Is there a generic RequestContext in Java servlet API?
You can attach an object to the current request with setAttribute
. This API is primarily used for internal routing, but it's safe to use for your own purposes too, as long as you use a proper namespace for your attribute names.
There isn't in the servlet API, but you can make your own pretty easily. (Some frameworks like spring-mvc, struts provide such functionality)
Just use a public static ThreadLocal
to store and retrieve the object. You can even store the HttpServletRequest
itself in the threadlocal and use its setAttribute()
/getAttribute()
methods, or you can store a threadlocal Map
, to be agnostic of the servlet API. An important note is that you should clean the threadlocal after the request (with a Filter, for example).
Also note that passing the object as parameter is considered a better practice, because you usually pass it from the web layer to a service layer, which should not be dependent on web-related object, like a HttpContext
.
If you decide that it is fine to store them in a thread-local, rather than passing them around:
public class RequestContext {
private static ThreadLocal<Map<Object, Object>> attributes = new ThreadLocal<>();
public static void initialize() {
attributes.set(new HashMap<Map<Object, Object>>());
}
public static void cleanup() {
attributes.set(null);
}
public static <T> T getAttribute(Object key) {
return (T) attributes.get().get(key);
}
public static void setAttribute(Object key, Object value) {
attributes.get().put(key, value);
}
}
And a necessary filter:
@WebFilter(urlPatterns="/")
public class RequestContextFilter implements Filter {
public void doFilter(..) {
RequestContext.initialize();
try {
chain.doFilter(request, response);
} finally {
RequestContext.cleanup();
}
}
}