A Servlet can be used with an HTML form tag to allow users to upload files to the server. An uploaded file could be a text file or image file or any document.
Creating a File Upload Form:
The following HTM code below creates an uploader form. Following are the important points to be noted down:
- The form method attribute should be set to POST method and GET method can not be used.
- The form enctype attribute should be set to multipart/form-data.
- The form action attribute should be set to a servlet file which would handle file uploading at backend server. Following example is using UploadServlet servlet to upload file.
- To upload a single file you should use a single <input .../> tag with attribute type="file". To allow multiple files uploading, include more than one input tags with different values for the name attribute. The browser associates a Browse button with each of them.
<html>
<head>
<title>File Uploading Form</title>
</head>
<body>
<h3>File Upload:</h3>
Select a file to upload: <br />
<form action="UploadServlet" method="post"
enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input type="file" name="file" size="50" />
<br />
<input type="submit" value="Upload File" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
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This will display following result which would allow to select a file from local PC and when user would click at "Upload File", form would be submitted along with the selected file:
File Upload: Select a file to upload: NOTE: This is just dummy form and would not work. |
Writing Backend Servlet:
Following is the servlet UploadServlet which would take care of accepting uploaded file and to store it in directory <Tomcat-installation-directory>/webapps/data. This directory name could also be added using an external configuration such as a context-param element in web.xml as follows:
<web-app>
....
<context-param>
<description>Location to store uploaded file</description>
<param-name>file-upload</param-name>
<param-value>
c:\apache-tomcat-5.5.29\webapps\data\
</param-value>
</context-param>
....
</web-app>
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Following is the source code for UploadServlet which can handle multiple file uploading at a time. Before procedding you have make sure the followings:
- Following example depends on FileUpload, so make sure you have the latest version ofcommons-fileupload.x.x.jar file in your classpath. You can download it fromhttp://commons.apache.org/fileupload/.
- FileUpload depends on Commons IO, so make sure you have the latest version ofcommons-io-x.x.jar file in your classpath. You can download it fromhttp://commons.apache.org/io/.
- While testing following example, you should upload a file which has less size thanmaxFileSize otherwise file would not be uploaded.
- Make sure you have created directories c:\temp and c:\apache-tomcat-5.5.29\webapps\data well in advance.
// Import required java libraries
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import javax.servlet.ServletConfig;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItem;
import org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileUploadException;
import org.apache.commons.fileupload.disk.DiskFileItemFactory;
import org.apache.commons.fileupload.servlet.ServletFileUpload;
import org.apache.commons.io.output.*;
public class UploadServlet extends HttpServlet {
private boolean isMultipart;
private String filePath;
private int maxFileSize = 50 * 1024;
private int maxMemSize = 4 * 1024;
private File file ;
public void init( ){
// Get the file location where it would be stored.
filePath =
getServletContext().getInitParameter("file-upload");
}
public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response)
throws ServletException, java.io.IOException {
// Check that we have a file upload request
isMultipart = ServletFileUpload.isMultipartContent(request);
response.setContentType("text/html");
java.io.PrintWriter out = response.getWriter( );
if( !isMultipart ){
out.println("<html>");
out.println("<head>");
out.println("<title>Servlet upload</title>");
out.println("</head>");
out.println("<body>");
out.println("<p>No file uploaded</p>");
out.println("</body>");
out.println("</html>");
return;
}
DiskFileItemFactory factory = new DiskFileItemFactory();
// maximum size that will be stored in memory
factory.setSizeThreshold(maxMemSize);
// Location to save data that is larger than maxMemSize.
factory.setRepository(new File("c:\\temp"));
// Create a new file upload handler
ServletFileUpload upload = new ServletFileUpload(factory);
// maximum file size to be uploaded.
upload.setSizeMax( maxFileSize );
try{
// Parse the request to get file items.
List fileItems = upload.parseRequest(request);
// Process the uploaded file items
Iterator i = fileItems.iterator();
out.println("<html>");
out.println("<head>");
out.println("<title>Servlet upload</title>");
out.println("</head>");
out.println("<body>");
while ( i.hasNext () )
{
FileItem fi = (FileItem)i.next();
if ( !fi.isFormField () )
{
// Get the uploaded file parameters
String fieldName = fi.getFieldName();
String fileName = fi.getName();
String contentType = fi.getContentType();
boolean isInMemory = fi.isInMemory();
long sizeInBytes = fi.getSize();
// Write the file
if( fileName.lastIndexOf("\\") >= 0 ){
file = new File( filePath +
fileName.substring( fileName.lastIndexOf("\\"))) ;
}else{
file = new File( filePath +
fileName.substring(fileName.lastIndexOf("\\")+1)) ;
}
fi.write( file ) ;
out.println("Uploaded Filename: " + fileName + "<br>");
}
}
out.println("</body>");
out.println("</html>");
}catch(Exception ex) {
System.out.println(ex);
}
}
public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response)
throws ServletException, java.io.IOException {
throw new ServletException("GET method used with " +
getClass( ).getName( )+": POST method required.");
}
}
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Compile and Running Servlet:
Compile above servlet UploadServlet and create required entry in web.xml file as follows.
<servlet> <servlet-name>UploadServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>UploadServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>UploadServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/UploadServlet</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> |
Now try to upload files using the HTML form which you created above. When you would try http://localhost:8080/UploadFile.htm, it would display following result which would help you uploading any file from your local machine.
File Upload: Select a file to upload: |
If your servelt script works fine, your file should be uploaded in c:\apache-tomcat-5.5.29\webapps\data\ directory.
