I am working a new project and I recently ran into an interesting problem. One of the web site that I keep up at work was supposed to take the user to another website which required me to add post parameters.
EX – http://www.mywebsite.makeapayment.com ==> Collects Billing information ex – name, amount, address etc.==> Post this information to http://www.vendor-website.com.
I did not realize the problem until I started coding and my colleague pointed out that as soon as http://www.mywebsite.makeapayment.com goes to my servlet, the servlet will not pass params to external web site if use “POST”, I had to use “GET” because servlet will look up relative path only and the HTTPServletRequest/Response object is specific to an application. So if I wanted to send parameters using servlet I could only that using action = GET. Now since I was passing sensitive information so I did not want to use GET.
A couple of solutions were discussed as follows:
1. Insert the params in database and use servlet get from the mywebsite.com to pass the primary key of the database. Ex – http://www.mywebsite.makeapayment.com ==> www.vendor-website.com?key=10001. The vendor application look up the required params from the database.
2. Create a new JSP and use JavaScript onLoad() to pass the params as Hidden Input and submit as post to www.vendor-website.com.
Ex – http://www.mywebsite.makeapayment.com==>; Servlet==> New Blank JSP with Hidden params loaded on onLoad() and submitted to vendor website ==> http://www.vendor-website.com.
3. Third approach is interesting and I had not tried this ever but looked promising and this is what I eventually implemented. Make an Ajax call to from the JSP page to your servlet and when the Ajax Call returns, post it to vendor web site.
Ex – http://www.mywebsite.makeapayment.com on hitting submit==> calls the JS, uses DWR to post to call the servlet==> Servlet does back ground processing like saving the records etc ==> Returns the control back to the JavaScript ==> Upon return in Ajax Call ==> Post to http://www.vendor-website.com.
I implemented the combination of one and three but here I am going to show you how post params to a different URL – i.e. solution 3
Let’s say I have a submit form with Name and address which needs to be saved in database when I submit the form and then I need to post the same information to different web site.
PersonalInformation.jsp
<html>
<head>
<script>
// I am not showing the code for DWR. You will need to include dwr and engine.js. Add dwr.xml in your web-inf and specify the class name and method you want to use as dwr call. This method is called in the dwr Ajax call back.
function submitAndGoToVendorSite()
{
var form = document.createElement(“FORM”);
form.method = “POST”;
form.style.display = “none”;
document.body.appendChild(form);
var url=”www.vendor-website.com”;
form.action = url;//My dwr ajax call gets a Json string from the servlet response.
var jsonString = ‘{“transactionId”:”1368505156670″,”requesterType”:”APP”,”billingEmail”:”null@cybersource.com”,”billingState”:”NC”,”amount”:”42.7699999999999999433786257441170164384″,”refund”:”N”,”billingCity”:”CONCORD”,”billingLine1″:”Progress Pl”,”billingFirstname”:”test”,”billingLine2″:”",”shopperIP”:”127.0.0.1″,”application”:”OEP2″,”currencyCode”:”USD”,”billingCompany”:”ACN”,”revenueSource”:”",”billingLastname”:”test”,”countryCode”:”US”,”billingAddrNum”:”1000″,”cardType”:”VISA”,”businessPurpose”:”TOOL”,”profileConfig”:”cybersource-MLTEST1″,”language”:”en”,”billingZip”:”28025″,”repOrCustID”:”1233836″,”user”:”DARORATEST”,”paymentMethod”:”CC”,”billingPhone”:”"}’
// Create a JSON object from the JSON String
var jsonObj = jQuery.parseJSON(jsonString);
//Iterate over Json object and set them as hidden input params to the form
for(obj in jsonObj){
var input = document.createElement(“INPUT”);
input.type = “hidden”;
input.name = obj;
input.value = jsonObj[obj];
form.appendChild(input);
}//Submit the form
form.submit();}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<label>Name:</label><Input type=”text”/>
……….
<input type=”button” onclick=”submitAndGoToVendorSite();”/>
</form>
</body>
That’s It!
~Keep Coding
. Anyway if you forgot to note down your access key and incase you are wondering where I can find that and are guessing that it will be on S3 Dashboard then you are mistaken just like me. You can find that on your account settings –> Security credentials.
