how to know the last page visited?

[Shashank Agarwal]

How can a jsp page know as to which page is the user coming from. As in, suppose, there is a jsp page abc.jsp and its got a link on def.html and ghi.html. Now how can it determine whether it was requested from def or ghi?

thanks in advance.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Shashank,
The referring page is in one of the HTTP headers:

request.getHeader("Referer")

[Shashank Agarwal]

Thanks a ton Jeanne.

[Junilu Lacar]

I'm not sure this will work in all cases, since there are conditions when a client is not supposed to send the referer header. Also, if your URI is hitting a servlet or if you're using a framework such as Struts, the JSP URI is obscured and I doubt the referer header will be of any use.

[Jeroen Wenting]

Add a history of visited pages to the session.

[Shashank Agarwal]

Well i tried using request.getHeader("Referer"). However, i face an problem with it. Let suppose the page calling abc.jsp was http://localhost:8080/jsp/def.html then it returns only http://localhost:8080/jsp/ without the def.html. In short the absolute path was not obtained.

[Dan Novik]

You can collect (record) current request info in the special filter, like something in JSOS: http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets.htm
This info is a "previous page" for the next request