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What Is URL Rewriting

As we know that session needs to be maintained because http is a stateless protocol.Due to which connection is lost or session is lost after every request response cycle between the client and the server.In order to maintain or track the session the server needs to get the additional information of the session id so that the session object pertaining to the client or server can be retrieved at the server side and the session can be managed.The session can be managed by either  cookies,hidden parameter or URL rewriting.

URL Rewriting is used in the cases where client browser does not accept cookies.In such case the server does not get the session id thus it is unable to relate he session object with the client or user.In order to maintain the session some extra piece of code needs to be added so that even if the cookies are not accepted at the browser level still the session can be maintained.URL Rewriting is something to fall upon as a precautionary measure.The code to get session and URL Rewriting is demonstrated below :

request.getSession();

out.println("<a href = "\"+response.encodeURL()+""\>Click Here</a>");

Here the anchor tag is used for URL Rewriting.Since the extra measure is used to take care that if the client browser does not accept cookies the session id is attached to the URL so that the session can be maintained.In URL Rewriting the session id is passed as an extra information with the URL that means rewriting of the URL is done.URL Rewriting can also be done with redirection as below :

response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL("URL-Pattern of the servlet"));

The first time the server  tries with both cookies and URL Rewriting ,if it finds that the cookies are not coming it checks for session id as a part of URL Rewriting and finds that it has to fall upon URL Rewriting if the code has provisioned that.