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POWhy does weblogic's "not found" behavior change after the first attempt?
 

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  1. POWhy does weblogic's "not found" behavior change after the first attempt?
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    <p>I'm using Weblogic 10.3.5. I work on a large legacy enterprise application with Struts (1.x) mapped as the default servlet.</p> <h2>Background</h2> <p>A bit of legacy convolution to start: each enterprise customer has a "subscriber ID" which their users must provide at login in addition to their username and password. Subscriber IDs are numeric and always at least four digits, usually five. If you go to mysite.com/, you are presented with a three-field login page: subscriber ID, username, and password.</p> <p>Our largest enterprise customers didn't like that, so many years ago we introduced skinned login pages: go to mysite.com/12345, where 12345 is your subscriber ID. We'll prepopulate and hide the subscriber ID field, and skin the login page with the enterprise customer's logo and color scheme.</p> <p>Years later, we had 100+ servlet mappings, one for each subscriber. Every new customer required a software deployment to add the servlet mapping, so our implementations team was hamstrung by the dev team's deployment schedule, which in turn was limited by our large enterprise customers' need to budget time for user acceptance testing.</p> <p>To address that, we changed the URL: mysite.com/login/12345, where /login/* is mapped to a single servlet that accepts any subscriber ID. We kept the old servlet mappings around so that existing customers didn't have to change the URL, but that left two annoyances:</p> <ol> <li>A few hundred lines of cruft in web.xml</li> <li>As a developer or QA, it's annoying to have to know whether this is an old subscriber or a new one before you know what URL to use to log in. Try to use the old method for a new subscriber? You get a 404 page.</li> </ol> <h2>Here's what I did</h2> <p>We had a pre-existing custom 404 page, correctly defined in web.xml and behaving exactly as expected. I updated it with the following code, right at the top:</p> <pre><code>&lt;% if (request.getRequestURI().matches("^/[\\d]{4,}$")) { // probably someone trying to log in with the old-style URL response.sendRedirect(String.format("/login%s", request.getRequestURI())); return; } %&gt; </code></pre> <p>This worked like a charm, until I noticed one oddity:</p> <h2>Here's what's wrong</h2> <p>The very first time I try to visit a URL that should result in a 404 but will be redirected because it matches the regex, it doesn't redirect. With my debugger, I've determined that the reason is that request.getRequestURI() returns "/errors/404error.jsp" rather than "/12345" like I would expect, resulting in the regex not matching and our normal 404 page being served to the user.</p> <p>My first thought was that something was telling the browser to redirect to the 404 page, but Chrome Dev Tools "Network" tab indicates that is not the case.</p> <p>After it fails that first time, my change works every subsequent time until the application server restarts.</p> <p>If I hit /login/12345 first it loads fine. Any subsequent attempt to hit /12345 will work fine, so it seems like it might have something to do with the login servlet not being fully initialized until after the first request. Weblogic is closed source, so I'm not able to dig into what's happening.</p> <h2>Here's my question</h2> <p>I know it's a pretty weird thing I'm doing; I'm open to other approaches. But the question is this: what's causing the different request URI on the first attempt, and how do I fix it? I've scoured the HttpServletRequest object in the debugger and I don't see any indication of the real request URI.</p>
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