Accessing images under WEB-INF

[Bunty Paul]

I need to store certain sensitive images under WEB-INF folder so that i will prevent users from accessing the images directory from the URL.

But in JSP i have to show the image like

<img src="/app/WEB-INF/images/my-image.gif" >

but still i can not view this image. How can i achieve this?


Note: these images are dynamically generated during file upload which is done previously

[Rahul Bhattacharjee]

Resources that are stored under WEB-INF are not publically visible.
You cannot use GET command to fetch those resources.

[Bunty Paul]

But is there any way i can achieve this...

1) I have to restrict users from directly accessing images folder

2) I should be able to display this image through my JSP

[Rahul Bhattacharjee]

Originally posted by Bunty Paul:
But is there any way i can achieve this...

1) I have to restrict users from directly accessing images folder

2) I should be able to display this image through my JSP

Your jsp's can access the resources under WEB-INF directly , but when you generate the img html tag using the jsp then its not fetching the image.The image fetching is done by the browser/ client when the jsp gets rendered.So the browser is trying to fetch the image ,which is stored within the WEB-INF.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Instead of letting the web server (or servlet container) serve the images directly, you can create a servlet that streams the images to the client. So instead of "img src="xyz.jpg" you'd have a URL like "img src="ImageServlet?src=xyz.jpg". Then you can keep the images in the WEB-INF folder (or in any other directory that's not publicly accessible), because the servlet can read the images from there, but not the browser.
[ December 11, 2006: Message edited by: Ulf Dittmer ]

[Ben Souther]

I have an example app on my site that does just this.
http://simple.souther.us

Look for SimpleStream.

[Bunty Paul]

Thanks all, thats the way i wanted.