Procedure 4.3. Create a Custom Valve

1. Configure the Maven dependencies.

   Add the following dependency configuration to the project pom.xml file.

   <dependency>
     <groupId>org.jboss.web</groupId>
     <artifactId>jbossweb</artifactId>
     <version>7.5.7.Final-redhat-1</version>
     <scope>provided</scope>
   </dependency>

   Note

   The jbossweb-VERSION.jar file should not be included in the application. It is available to the JBoss EAP server runtime classpath as a JBoss module at this location: EAP_HOME/modules/system/layers/base/org/jboss/as/web/main/jbossweb-7.5.7.Final-redhat-1.jar.

2. Create the Valve class

   Create a subclass of org.apache.catalina.valves.ValveBase.

   package org.jboss.samplevalves;
   
   import org.apache.catalina.valves.ValveBase;
   import org.apache.catalina.connector.Request;
   import org.apache.catalina.connector.Response;
   
   public class RestrictedUserAgentsValve extends ValveBase {
   
   }

3. Implement the invoke method.

   The invoke() method is called when this valve is executed in the pipeline. The request and response objects are passed as parameters. Perform any processing and modification of the request and response here.

   public void invoke(Request request, Response response)
   {
   
   }

4. Invoke the next pipeline step.

   The last thing the invoke method must do is invoke the next step of the pipeline and pass the modified request and response objects along. This is done using the getNext().invoke() method

   getNext().invoke(request, response);

5. Optional: Specify parameters.

   If the valve must be configurable, enable this by adding a parameter. Do this by adding an instance variable and a setter method for each parameter.

   private String restrictedUserAgents = null;
   
   public void setRestricteduserAgents(String mystring) 
   {
      this.restrictedUserAgents = mystring;
   }

6. Review the completed code example.

   The class should now look like the following example.

   Example 4.4. Sample Custom Valve

   package org.jboss.samplevalves;
   
   import java.io.IOException;
   import java.util.regex.Pattern;
   
   import javax.servlet.ServletException;
   import org.apache.catalina.valves.ValveBase;
   import org.apache.catalina.connector.Request;
   import org.apache.catalina.connector.Response;
   
   public class RestrictedUserAgentsValve extends ValveBase 
   {
       private String restrictedUserAgents = null;
   
       public void setRestrictedUserAgents(String mystring) 
       {
           this.restrictedUserAgents = mystring;
       }
   
       public void invoke(Request request, Response response) throws IOException, ServletException 
       {
         String agent = request.getHeader("User-Agent");
         System.out.println("user-agent: " + agent + " : " + restrictedUserAgents);
         if (Pattern.matches(restrictedUserAgents, agent)) 
         {
            System.out.println("user-agent: " + agent + " matches: " + restrictedUserAgents);
            response.addHeader("Connection", "close");
         }
         getNext().invoke(request, response);
       }
   }