Unheralded Java Filters Simplify Web-app Testing : Page 3

// determine the script paths
String filePath 
		= req.getSession().getServletContext().getRealPath
		(req.getServletPath())
		+ ".validate.htm";
String fileUrl = http:// + req.getServerName() + ":"
		+ req.getServerPort()
		+ req.getRequestURI()
		+ ".validate.htm";

// write the temporary page out to disk
FileWriter fw = new FileWriter(filePath);
fw.write(contents);
fw.close();

// validate the page
String results = this.validate(req, fileUrl, contents);

// delete the page on disk
File f = new File(filePath);
f.delete();

// insert our validation results into the page
contents = contents + results;

// send the page to the browser
CharArrayWriter caw = new CharArrayWriter();
caw.write(contents);
response.setContentLength(caw.toString().length());
out.write(caw.toString());

out.close();

The code should be easy enough to read. First, you determine where to write your file and the corresponding URL where the W3C Validation Service can access it. Then you write the file out. The following line performs the actual submission to the W3C Validation Service and formats the XML results, via the validate() method:

String results = this.validate(req, fileUrl, contents);

I've left out the code for the validate() method, as it has little to do with Java filters specifically. If you have worked with XML in Java—using JAXP and DOM and such—the code should be familiar territory. If not, it's not tough to follow anyway. You can find the complete source code in the downloadable code for this article.

Since your temporary HTML page has been validated, you can now delete it:

File f = new File(filePath);
f.delete();

After that, send the results back to the Web browser with these lines:

CharArrayWriter caw = new CharArrayWriter();
caw.write(contents);
response.setContentLength(caw.toString().length());
out.write(caw.toString());

Almost There, Just Configure the Filter
You are not quite done yet. You still need to deploy the filter so your servlet container knows you want to use it. One of the nice things about filters is that you do not have to modify any existing code in order to introduce them into your Web app. All you need to do is add a <filter> element into the web.xml file:

  <filter>
   <filter-name>HTMLValidatorFilterLite</filter-name>
   <filter-class>org.twine.filter.HTMLValidatorFilterLite</filter-class>       
  </filter>

Then you need to set up a mapping in your web.xml file that tells the servlet container when to use this filter. To set the filter up to validate all JSP files, you use the following code:

   <filter-mapping>
      <filter-name>HTMLValidatorFilterLite</filter-name>
      <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
   </filter-mapping>  

Be careful with these mappings. The W3C Validation Service will make requests to your server as well. So if you set up the filter to catch all requests (<url-pattern>*</url-pattern>), the W3C Validation Service's request will trigger another invocation of the filter, followed by another request, and so on. The file written to disk has a default extension of '.htm', so any <url-pattern> you use should avoid that one.

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