Uploading Files with Beans
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The Entity Body

The entity body is the content of the HTTP request itself. It is best to illustrate this with an example. An example of an HTTP header is given below.

Accept: application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, */*
Accept-Language: en-au
Connection: Keep-Alive
Host: localhost
Referer: http://localhost/examples/jsp/num/demo.jsp
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 98)
Content-Length: 32
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

LastName=truman&FirstName=daniel

A lot is revealed in the HTTP header above. The first line tells us that the browser that sends this request can accept a number of file formats, including Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. It is followed by the language used (in this case, Australian English), the type of connection (keep-alive), and the name of the host (localhost). It also tells the server that the request is sent from the demo.jsp which is located in http://localhost/examples/jsp/num/ directory. Then in the User-Agent entry, the Request tells that the user is using a Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01, which is compatible with Netscape 4.0. The user operation system is also recorded to be Windows 98. The meaning of the information to follow can be retrieved from the previous tables.

Following the header is two pairs of carriage-return line-feed characters. The length of this separator is 4 bytes since each carriage-return line-feed character pair consists of the ASCII characters number 13 and 10. From the HTTP header above we can see that the body consists of the following code:

LastName=truman&FirstName=daniel

This is clearly from a form with two input boxes: one called LastName with the value truman and the other named FirstName with the value daniel.

Note that the length of LastName=truman&FirstName=daniel is 32.

Now that you have finished dissecting an HTTP request, you are ready to take this information to the coding stage. To program a complete file upload application, you need to know both the server side and the client side. First we will learn how to program the HTML on the client side, and then we will study the Java code for the server side.

The Client Side HTML

Prior to the RFC 1867 standard, there were eight possible values for the type attribute of an input element: checkbox, hidden, image, password, radio, reset, submit, and text. While these form elements have proven useful in a wide variety of applications in which input from the user needs to be transferred to the server, none of these is useful for sending a file, either text or binary. Next, it was proposed that the Type attribute of an Input element has another possible value: file. In addition, it defines a new MIME media type, multipart/form-data, and specifies the behavior of HTML user agents when interpreting a form with enctype="multipart/form-data" or <input type="file" /> tags.

The author of an HTML form who wants to request one or more files from a user might write:

<form action="Jsp1.jsp" enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post">
File to Upload: <input name="filename" type="file" />
<br />
<input type="submit" value="Upload" />
</form>

When an input tag of type file is encountered, the browser might show a display of previously selected file names and a "Browse" button or selection method. Selecting the "Browse" button would cause the browser to enter into a file selection mode appropriate for the platform. Window-based browsers might pop up a file selection window, for example. In such a file selection dialog, the user would have the option of replacing a current selection, adding a new file selection, etc.

The HttpServletRequest Interface

Internet programming in Java always involves the use of Servlets or JSP pages, depending on the architecture you choose to implement. This means that you will use one of the classes or interfaces in the javax.servlet package or the javax.servlet.http package. The most important interface is the Servlet interface in the javax.servlet package that must be implemented by all servlets. However, I will not present an introduction to Servlets in this article and can only refer you to Sun's Web site if you need more details about this API. What is of importance here is the HTTP request and how to process it. When working with the HTTP request, you will work with either the javax.servlet.ServletRequest interface or javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest. The ServletRequest interface is a generic interface that is extended by HttpServletRequest to provide request information for HTTP Servlets.

The HttpServletRequest interface has the following signature.

public interface HttpServletRequest extends ServletRequest

The Servlet container creates an HttpServletRequest object and passes it as an argument to the Servlet's service methods (doGet, doPost, etc). For a File Upload Bean, you can then pass this HttpServletRequest object to the Bean for further processing, like the one in this article.

HttpServletRequest's Important Methods

Some important methods of HttpServletRequest are given in the following list.

public long getDateHeader(java.lang.String name)

Returns the value of the specified request header as a long value that represents a Date object. Use this method with headers that contain dates, such as If-Modified-Since.

The date is returned as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970 GMT. The header name is case insensitive.

If the request did not have a header of the specified name, this method returns -1. If the header can't be converted to a date, the method throws an IllegalArgumentException.

public java.lang.String getHeader(java.lang.String name)

Returns the value of the specified request header as a String. If the request did not include a header of the specified name, this method returns null. The header name is case insensitive. You can use this method with any request header.

public java.util.Enumeration getHeaderNames()

Returns an enumeration of all the header names this request contains. If the request has no headers, this method returns an empty enumeration.

Some Servlet containers do not allow do not allow Servlets to access headers using this method, in which case this method returns null

public java.util.Enumeration getHeaders(java.lang.String name)

Returns all the values of the specified request header as an Enumeration of String objects.

Some headers such as Accept-Language can be sent by clients as several headers each with a different value rather than sending the header as a comma separated list.

If the request did not include any headers of the specified name, this method returns an empty Enumeration. The header name is case insensitive. You can use this method with any request header.

public java.lang.String getMethod()

Returns the name of the HTTP method with which this request was made, for example, get, post, or put. This is the same as the value of the CGI variable REQUEST_METHOD.

public java.lang.String getPathInfo()

Returns any extra path information associated with the URL the client sent when it made this request. The extra path information follows the Servlet path but precedes the query string. This method returns null if there was no extra path information.

This is the same as the value of the CGI variable PATH_INFO.

public java.lang.String getPathTranslated()

Returns any extra path information after the Servlet name but before the query string and translates it to a real path. This is the same as the value of the CGI variable PATH_TRANSLATED.

If the URL does not have any extra path information, this method returns null.

public java.lang.String getQueryString()

Returns the query string that is contained in the request URL after the path. This method returns null if the URL does not have a query string. This is the same as the value of the CGI variable QUERY_STRING.

public java.lang.String getRemoteUser()

Returns the login of the user making this request, if the user has been authenticated, or null if the user has not been authenticated. Whether the user name is sent with each subsequent request depends on the browser and type of authentication. This is the same as the value of the CGI variable REMOTE_USER.

public java.lang.String getRequestedSessionId()

Returns the session ID specified by the client. This may not be the same as the ID of the actual session in use. For example, if the request specified an old (expired) session ID and the server has started a new session, this method gets a new session with a new ID. If the request did not specify a session ID, this method returns null.

public java.lang.String getRequestURI()

Returns the part of this request's URL from the protocol name up to the query string in the first line of the HTTP request.

public java.lang.String getServletPath()

Returns the part of this request's URL that calls the Servlet. This includes either the Servlet name or a path to the Servlet, but does not include any extra path information or a query string. This is the same as the value of the CGI variable SCRIPT_NAME.

public HttpSession getSession(boolean create)

Returns the current HttpSession associated with this request or, if there is no current session and create is true, returns a new session.

If create is false and the request has no valid HttpSession, this method returns null.

To make sure the session is properly maintained, you must call this method before the response is committed.

public HttpSession getSession()

Returns the current session associated with this request or, if the request does not have a session, creates one.

HTTP request of an uploaded file

To illustrate how you can process a file upload, you should familiarize yourself with the HTTP request of an uploaded file. The following small application demonstrates how to upload a file and writes the HTTP request into a file. Viewing the file with a text editor will reveal the format of the request, which in turn enables you to extract the filename, the file content, and other useful information that are mixed together. This small application is meant as a preparation before we discuss the real File Upload Bean and consists of an HTML file called main.html, a JSP file called Jsp1.jsp, and a JavaBean called SimpleBean.

The main.html file is the one that the client can use to select a file to upload to the server and is given as follows.

<html>
<head>
<title>File Upload</title>
</head>
<body>
<form action="jsp1.jsp" enctype="MULTIPART/FORM-DATA" method=post>
Author: <input type="text" name="author" />
<br />
Company: <input type="text" name="company" />
<br />
Select file to upload <input type="file" name="filename" />
<br />
<input type="submit" value="Upload" />
</form>
</body>
</html>

You can see that the enctype attribute is used in the <form> tag and its value is "MULTIPART/FORM-DATA". There are four input elements including the submit button. The first two are normal text elements called Author and Company. The third one is an element of type file, the input element that is used to select a file.

The action attribute of the form has the value of Jsp1.jsp, meaning that the request (and also the file uploaded) is sent to the Jsp1.jsp file.

The Jsp1.jsp simply calls a Bean called SimpleBean.

<jsp:useBean id="TheBean" scope="page" class="SimpleBean " />
<%
TheBean.doUpload(request);
%>

And here is the code for the SimpleBean Bean.

import java.io.*;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import javax.servlet.ServletInputStream;

public class FileUploadBean {

public void doUpload(HttpServletRequest request) throws
IOException {
PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(
new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("Demo.out")));
ServletInputStream in = request.getInputStream();

int i = in.read();
while (i != -1) {
pw.print((char) i);
i = in.read();
}
pw.close();
}
}

It will write everything on the HttpServletRequest object to a file named Demo.out.

The user interface is given by the main.html file and is shown in Figure 1. For this example, we enter some input values for the Author and Company input elements and select a file called abisco.html with the following content. I select an HTML file to upload because I would like to show the content of the file in the format. Since an HTML file is more or less a text file, the content will be easy to display.

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