BugRat Report #657 - Tomcat's webserver doesn't create URLs properly for oddly named files.

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Report #657 Details

Project: Tomcat
Category: Bug Report
SubCategory: New Bug Report
Class: swbug
State: received
Priority: low
Severity: non-critical
Confidence: public
Environment: 
   Release: Tomcat 3.2+
   JVM Release: Sun/HotSpot/1.3.0
   Operating System: Windows NT 4.0
   OS Release: 4.0 SP6a
   Platform: Windows

Synopsis: 
Tomcat's webserver doesn't create URLs properly for oddly named files.

Description:
While Tomcat's JSP engine handles oddly named files very well, the builtin webserver does a poor job of creating properly formatted URLs for those files. 

For example, a JSP with filename "odd file name.jsp" should be accessed by the relative URL "/path/odd%20file%20name.jsp". Unfortunately, when the webserver's directory indexer generates relative URLs like this, "/path/odd file name.jsp", so that when the user follows this link, a 404 error page is returned:

Not found (404)
Original request: /path/odd
Not found request: /paths/odd

Also, if it's an oddly named resource (html file), then the webserver can't handle the correct URL, either. (For example, for "odd file.html", the directory indexer will generate a link like "/path/odd file.html", which doesn't work, so I type "http://server/path/odd%20file.html" into the location, and I get a 404:

Not found (404)
Original request: /path/odd%20file.html
Not found request: /path/odd%20file.html

Clearly, the webserver included in tomcat is not a production webserver, and tomcat is meant to be installed into another webserver, but it is a bug none-the-less. The indexer could probobly be fixed rather easily to generate proper directory indices, and there's a good chance that the resource finder could be patched to handle %-escaped URLs proplerly relatively easily, too.