HttpServletRequest - get previous page url

[Brian Hsu]

HttpServletRequest has methods to get the current page's URL. Is it possible to get the previous like Apache log's referrer? Thanks.

[Paul Clapham]

Yes, except the name of the HTTP header you're looking for is "Referer" (not spelled the way you might expect). You can get header values from the request.

[Bear Bibeault]

Be aware that it is not guaranteed to be set, or to be set correctly.

Why do you need this? If you are trying to make decisions regarding what to do based on where you came from... don't!

[Brian Hsu]

Bear Bibeault wrote:Be aware that it is not guaranteed to be set, or to be set correctly.

Why do you need this? If you are trying to make decisions regarding what to do based on where you came from... don't!

I'm trying to use this for debugging. Currently I'm getting lots of error notification emails from an URL and I'd like to find out where/how users got to that page from.

[Bear Bibeault]

Ah, ok. I was hoping it wasn't something along the lines of what was being discussed here.

[Bear Bibeault]

For debugging, you should also be able to use tools such as HttpFox to observe the headers without having to change any code.