Servlet url pattern with wildcard in the middle

Question

I'm working on an HttpServlet and trying to define a url-pattern with a wildcard, but not finding much documentation.

The path I want to capture is "resource/{id}/action"

I've tried my annotation as:

@WebServlet("/resource/*/action")

but this doesn't match, though the more basic "resource/*" works okay.

Also, is there any way I can automatically pull out my {id} wildcard, rather than having to parse the url manually?

Answer 1

I'm think you try to solve wrong task. It's really unusual decision to map servlet on wildcard like this. Take a look on Spring MVC framework there you can write methods like this

@RequestMapping("/owners/{ownerId}/pets/{petId}", method=RequestMethod.GET)
public String findPet(@PathVariable String ownerId, @PathVariable String petId, Model model) {
  Owner owner = ownerService.findOwner(ownderId);  
  Pet pet = owner.getPet(petId);  
  model.addAttribute("pet", pet);  
  return "displayPet"; 
}