SRV.6.3 Convenience Methods

The following convenience methods exist in the HttpServletResponse interface:

sendRedirect
sendError

The sendRedirect method will set the appropriate headers and content body to redirect the client to a different URL. It is legal to call this method with a relative URL path; however, the underlying container must translate the relative path to a fully qualified URL for transmission back to the client. If a partial URL is given and, for whatever reason, cannot be converted into a valid URL, then this method must throw an IllegalArgumentException .

The sendError method will set the appropriate headers and content body to return to the client. An optional String argument can be provided to the sendError method which can be used in the content body of the error.

These methods will have the side effect of committing the response, if it had not already been committed, and terminating it. No further output to the client should be made by the servlet after these methods are called. If data is written to the response after these methods are called, the data is ignored.

If data has been written to the response buffer, but not returned to the client (i.e., the response is not committed), the data in the response buffer must be cleared and replaced with the data set by these methods. If the response is committed, these methods must throw an IllegalStateException .