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20021206 Friday December 06, 2002

Form-based auth - getting the original URL Lance suggested a while back that I try Roller's BreadCrumbFilter to get the originally requested URL for form-based authentication. The idea is that if you can get this URL, you can use it to login again on your form-login-error page. So I added BreadCrumbFilter.java to my security project and mapped it to /*. The value I'm hoping to grab is a URL to welcome.do, since that is where I route users when the hit the welcome page. I found that this filter never gives me welcome.do, but that request.getHeader("referer"); gives it to me just fine - but only in IE. Yeck. I guess Craig was right when he said that you can't reliably get the original URL. I guess you can always just hard-code the action in your form-error-page to go to your main menu. That is, if your app server doesn't support the same page thing. Posted in General at Dec 06 2002, 09:46:18 AM MST 3 Comments

Comments:

Did you try mapping the filter to *.do ? If someone is hitting the welcome page they aren't specifying anything and that is likely why /* fails. Depending on the server calling http://www.clowns.com will not trigger a /* mapping (because there is no slash). Resin (and Tomcat) are like that, whereas WLS 6.1 appears to do a response.sendRedirect( welcome.do ) since I actually *see* this in my address bar - which I do not with the aforementioned servers. So *.do probably will fail to... argh.

Posted by Lance on December 08, 2002 at 08:52 AM MST #

I am doing exactly the same thing using form based authentication. A security filter redirects requests without a critical field "state" to the welcome.do, since the "state" must be specified in the welcome page. The login-error-page drove me nuts. Considering 2 senarios, a user hit back to return to the login page, and refresh it, a user tries to access a protected resource which requires higher role privilege. Both will be redirected to the login page. Can't find a way to tell the different between them.

Posted by Unknown on December 11, 2003 at 08:41 PM MST #

You might try using Tomcat 5.0.16 - if you do request.getRequestURL() on the login.jsp page - it'll actually give you the URL for the protected resource that the user is trying to get to.

Posted by Matt Raible on December 11, 2003 at 08:49 PM MST #

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