Regex use

I looked into SecurityFilter originally because I needed to protect
almost all resources within a webapp except for a few that represent a
front door view, and login page components, and I thought that regex
functionality could do this for me. I had hoped that I could specify a
regex in the config file, since they are so powerful.

However, the way that SecurityFilter works is that it assumes a
significantly simpler URL Pattern in the config file, so that my regex
expressions are mauled up.

What I had wanted to do was match almost every URL expect those under a
/public directory, and one index.jsp page, so that instead of manually
securing a resource, the default is that it's secure and you have to
manually unsecure it.

I propose that true and untampered regex functionality be included in the
matching code; this is a small modification, but allows for much more
powerful matching ability. I've made a modification to URLPattern to
accomplish this; basically, prefixing a URLPattern value by "RE:" tells
URLPattern to interpret it as a true regular expression, and compiler it
as is. I don't think that the string "RE:" will clash with any URL
pattern.

And as for the suggestions that regex capability be removed, I agree that
it might be removed for some pattern types, but should still be available,
at least for this functionality.

rob



patch: ---------------------------------------------------------------------

Index: URLPattern.java
===================================================================
RCS file:
/cvsroot/securityfilter/securityfilter/src/share/org/securityfilter/filter/URLPattern.java,v
retrieving revision 1.1
diff -r1.1 URLPattern.java
85a86,90
> 	/**
> 	 * Pattern type for patterns that are regular expressions themselves;
> 	 * they are preceeded by "RE:".
> 	 */
>    public static final int RE_TYPE = 4;
189c194,197
<       if (pattern.startsWith("*.")) {
---
>
> 	  if (pattern.startsWith("RE:") ) {
>          patternType = URLPattern.RE_TYPE;
>       } else if (pattern.startsWith("*.")) {
251a260,263
>
> 	  // however, if RE_TYPE, assume that input was valid RE, and just remove "RE:" prefix
> 	  if (patternType == RE_TYPE) { convertedPattern = pattern.substring(3);}
>





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