Your concrete problem is most likely caused because your JSF command link/button is actually sending an ajax request which in turn expects a special XML response. If you’re sending a redirect as response to an ajax request, then it would just re-send the ajax request to that URL. This in turn fails without feedback because the redirect URL returns a whole HTML page instead of a special XML response. You should actually be returning a special XML response wherein the JSF ajax engine is been instructed to change the current window.location.
But you’ve actually bigger problems: using the wrong tool for the job. You should use a servlet filter for the job, not a homegrown servlet and for sure not one which supplants the FacesServlet who is the responsible for all the JSF works.
Assuming that you’re performing the login in a request/view scoped JSF backing bean as follows (if you’re using container managed authentication, see also 2nd example of Performing user authentication in Java EE / JSF using j_security_check):
externalContext.getSessionMap().put("user", user);
Then this kickoff example of a filter should do:
@WebFilter("/*") // Or @WebFilter(servletNames={"facesServlet"})
public class AuthorizationFilter implements Filter {
private static final String AJAX_REDIRECT_XML = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"
+ "<partial-response><redirect url=\"%s\"></redirect></partial-response>";
@Override
public void doFilter(ServletRequest req, ServletResponse res, FilterChain chain) throws ServletException, IOException {
HttpServletRequest request = (HttpServletRequest) req;
HttpServletResponse response = (HttpServletResponse) res;
HttpSession session = request.getSession(false);
String loginURL = request.getContextPath() + "/login.xhtml";
boolean loggedIn = (session != null) && (session.getAttribute("user") != null);
boolean loginRequest = request.getRequestURI().equals(loginURL);
boolean resourceRequest = request.getRequestURI().startsWith(request.getContextPath() + ResourceHandler.RESOURCE_IDENTIFIER + "https://stackoverflow.com/");
boolean ajaxRequest = "partial/ajax".equals(request.getHeader("Faces-Request"));
if (loggedIn || loginRequest || resourceRequest)) {
if (!resourceRequest) { // Prevent browser from caching restricted resources. See also https://stackoverflow.com/q/4194207/157882
response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"); // HTTP 1.1.
response.setHeader("Pragma", "no-cache"); // HTTP 1.0.
response.setDateHeader("Expires", 0); // Proxies.
}
chain.doFilter(request, response); // So, just continue request.
}
else if (ajaxRequest) {
response.setContentType("text/xml");
response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
response.getWriter().printf(AJAX_REDIRECT_XML, loginURL); // So, return special XML response instructing JSF ajax to send a redirect.
}
else {
response.sendRedirect(loginURL); // So, just perform standard synchronous redirect.
}
}
// ...
}