form post emulation

[pg]

I have a form which is being redirected to another website on submission. This form is auto-submitted when the page is loaded.

I want to replace this form altogether and have the controller create the form contents and submit it to the other website. I do not want the user to see the form.

I do not think RedirectView will work since it puts all the parameters into the request string, I want to emulate a POST.

What is the best way to do this?

[davison]

you can use standard network classes like URLConnection, but you'll find it much easier with something like HttpUnit.

This isn't really a Spring issue.

Regards

[pg]

Thanks and sorry for the incorrect posting I just thought there might be an easy solution within Spring.

[pg]

Hopefully this will help someone with a similar problem. I solved this using org.apache.commons.httpclient which comes with Spring and dependencies in the lib/jakarta-commons and package commons-httpclient.jar.

Here is some sample code:

public ModelAndView handleRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws ServletException, IOException {

PostToOtherSite(request, response);

return null;
}

private void PostToOtherSite(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) {

NameValuePair langNVP = new NameValuePair("lang", "en");
NameValuePair nameNVP = new NameValuePair("name", "Paul");

// Create an instance of HttpClient.
HttpClient client = new HttpClient();

// Create a method instance.
PostMethod method = new PostMethod("http://someWebsite");

// Provide custom retry handler is necessary
DefaultMethodRetryHandler retryhandler = new DefaultMethodRetryHandler();
retryhandler.setRequestSentRetryEnabled(false);
retryhandler.setRetryCount(3);
method.setMethodRetryHandler(retryhandler);

method.setRequestBody(
new NameValuePair[] {langNVP, nameNVP});
try {
// Execute the method.
int statusCode = client.executeMethod(method);

if (statusCode != HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
logger.error("Method failed: " + method.getStatusLine());
}

// Read the response body.
byte[] responseBody = method.getResponseBody();

// Output the response to the browser.
ServletOutputStream os = response.getOutputStream();
os.print(new String(responseBody));
os.flush();
os.close();

} catch (IOException e) {
logger.error("Failed to download file." + e.getMessage());
} finally {
// Release the connection.
method.releaseConnection();
}
}


Alot of this was extracted from the apache jakarta website.