Calling a Servlet Programmatically

First, identify which servlet to call by specifying a URI. This URI is normally a path relative to the current application. For example, if your servlet is part of an application with a context root named OfficeFrontEnd, the URL to a servlet called ShowSupplies from a browser is as follows:

http://server:port/OfficeFrontEnd/servlet/ShowSupplies?name=value

You can call this servlet programmatically from another servlet in one of two ways.

• To include another servlet's output, use the include() method from the RequestDispatcher interface. This method calls a servlet by its URI and waits for it to return before continuing to process the interaction. The include() method can be called multiple times within a given servlet.

  For example:

   RequestDispatcher dispatcher =
       getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher("/servlet/ShowSupplies");
    dispatcher.include(request, response);

• To handle interaction control to another servlet, use the RequestDispatcher interfaces forward() method with the servlet's URI as a parameter.

  This example shows a servlet using forward():

   RequestDispatcher dispatcher =
       getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher("/servlet/ShowSupplies");
    dispatcher.forward(request, response);