Wicket form submit not safe for redirecting to intercept page

The problem

When you have a form, that anybody can see, but only logged on users can POST, you may want to redirect the user to the login page, and back to the form after login

Using wicket 1.3/1.4, if you do that using redirectToInterceptPage(loginPage) or RestartResponseAtInterceptPageException, after returning, the client will loose all the data entered to the form.

The details

The reason why this happens, is because of how redirectToInterceptPage works. It saves the URL of the requested page, and later, when continueToOriginalDestination is called, it redirects the client to the saved URL using GET. When the last call from the client was a non-ajax POST to the form, the client will be redirected without any posted data. Wicket will handle the situation issuing  HTTP 302 and redirecting the user again, but all the data is already lost.

The funny thing is that the data is actually getting to the form, because of the first POST, but then it’s overwritten with nulls on the redirected GET. To make it clear, here’s the HTTP conversation:

Client: POST http://localhost:8080/test?wicket:interface=:3:form::IFormSubmitListener:: (post to the form)
Server: HTTP 302 Moved Temporarily (the input was parsed, the model was updated, but you are being redirected to the login page because of redirectToInterceptPage or exception)
Client: GET http://localhost:8080/?wicket:interface=:4:::: 
Server: HTTP 200 OK (server is responding with the login page)
Client: POST  https://localhost:8443/j_spring_security_check.... (post login and password, here using spring security)
Server: HTTP 302 Moved Temporarily (validation is done. Now you are redirected from spring security to the page with wicket redirectToInterceptPage)
Client: GET https://localhost:8443/redirectAfterLogin  (here  redirectToInterceptPage is called)
Server: HTTP 302 Moved Temporarily (you are being redirected the original URL)
Client: GET http://localhost:8080/test?wicket:interface=:3:form::IFormSubmitListener:: (the same URL as the first POST but this time without post data. now your form is being submitted again, but with nulls instead of entered data)
Server: HTTP 302 Moved Temporarily (being redirected by wicket, because of Redirect After Post pattern)
Client: GET http://localhost:8080/?wicket:interface=:3:1::: (back on the form page)
Server: HTTP 200 OK (the form is empty by now)

As you see, if wicket would not redirect you at the end to the url requested by POST, but to the one called by last GET before the original POST, your data would be there.

The issue was reported two years ago. Doesn’t look like it’s getting fixed any time soon.

The walkaround

If you can require your users to be logged in before you show them the form, you are safe. If not, you can submit the form by AJAX. This will solve the problem, because wicket will recognize, that it cannot redirect the user to the AJAX POST target (is not exactly what the user would like to have rendered in the browser), and will redirect with GET to the URL of the last page instead, which was also requested by GET. And since the data was converted to the form model in the first POST (line 1), all is well.

And in case you don’t want to have a partial page update via AJAX, but would rather like to render the whole page, all you need to do is add setResponsePage(getPage()) to your button. For example like this:

class AjaxSendButton extends AjaxFallbackButton {
    public AjaxSendButton(String id, Form form) {
        super(id, form);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onSubmit(AjaxRequestTarget target, Form form) {
        //process your form input here
        setResponsePage(getPage());
    }
}

Now your ajax form behaves just like a non ajax form, but can be redirected to an intercept page

The catch

When submitting forms via AJAX you have to be aware, that your form may be submitted without your submit button being clicked on. This may have unforseen consequences. For the whole problem description and a solution go here