References

HTML forms page at w3schools

Project 3

This project has 3 servlets and each one has an associated stylesheet. The servlets are the drivers and are responsible for processing user requests and preparing the response data, while the stylesheets are responsible for rendering that data as HTML.

The servlets communicate information to the stylesheets via XML data and stylesheet parameters, while the stylesheets communicate data to the servlets via HTTP request parameters.

The login servlet demonstrates:

• retrieving and storing session data (the "username" session attribute)
• invalidating a session
• retrieving HTTP request parameters (the "username", "password", and "submit" parameters)
• interacting with the back-end UserManager instance to maintain data associated with a user. Note that the UserManager provides additional services that you'll need to access in the view and prefs servlets.
• invoking Xalan by way of TrAX and providing both XML data and parameters. In this case the XML data is provided as a file (and is not used by the stylesheet), but other formats like String are also possible. The parameter that's passed to the stylesheet is "error".

The login stylesheet demonstrates:

• rendering an HTML page from XML input data and stylesheet parameters
• the inclusion of an HTML form to accept user input data which is communicated to the login servlet via an HTTP POST request, with HTML input parameters named "username", "password", and "submit", which are communicated to the servlet as HTTP request parameters.

(Note that though the Login page is operational as distributed, it redirects to the View servlet, which doesn't contain any code!)

The "view" part of the application needs to present hyperlinks to headlines in some category, and some means for the user to navigate to the headlines from his other favorite categories, via links to the view servlet, and some means to navigate to the view and prefs pages. You'll need to determine how the view servlet will behave when it receives a request that doesn't contain a category (e.g., implement some mechanism for tracking the last category the user displayed and use that, or arbitrarily pick one of the user's preferred categories, or redirect to the prefs servlet if the user hasn't chosen any categories, or pick an arbitrary category, etc.)

The "prefs" part needs to display the categories within some channel, and offer some way for the user to navigate to a display of the categories from a different channel, via links to the prefs servlet, and some means to navigate to the view and login servlets. In addition, the user must be offered a way to add or remove any of the displayed categories from his list of favorites, with an HTML form that constructs a set of checkboxes via "input" tags, or maybe a list constructed from a "select" tag, with "option" tags representing each category. Note that one of the design issues here is deciding how to deal with the removal of categories. This requires some thought, since only "checked" or "selected" categories will be posted to the servlet as request parameters. There are a number of possible approaches.

Remember that the XML data you construct must take reserved characters into account by encoding them as entity references. Note also that URLs have special characters that must be URL-encoded. URL encoding is generally handled automatically by the browser (converting spaces to plus signs for instance), however the ampersand, along with a few others, is a special case in that it has special meaning in the query string portion of GET requests. A hyperlink that looks like this:

http://www.blah.com/doSomething?param1=abc&param2=xyz

results in an HTTP GET request for "doSomething" at www.blah.com, with parameters "param1" and "param2". The parameters are encoded within the "query string" of the URL, which starts with the question mark, and parameters are delimited by ampersands. If you need to insert a literal ampersand into one of the parameter values, it must be URL-encoded as %26, where 26 is the hexadecimal representation for an ampersand in the ASCII character set. For example, if you needed to set the value of param1 to "you&me", you'd have to do it like this:

http://www.blah.com/doSomething?param1=you%26me&param2=xyz

If you didn't encode the ampersand you'd end up with three request parameters: param1=you, me=, and param2=xyz.

The JDK provides a class to perform URL encoding, java.net.URLEncoder, which you can see in action in the project's NewsProvider class. XSLT, on the other hand, does not provide any convenient mechanism for URL endoding/decoding. One possible route is to call out to the Java URLEncoder class from within a stylesheet, but this is accomplished differently by different XSLT processors, and it's probably easier to account for the problem in the servlets.

In particular, Moreover may have category and channel names that contain ampersands, so be prepared.

Finally, for those of you having trouble visualizing what this portal might look like, here are two example pages that might help:

view

prefs

You can do better!