Logging Payload of POSTs to Tomcat

java, tomcat

Solution

Since there was not a suggestion of a built in way to get the POST payload, I went ahead and wrote a custom filter that dumps the contents of the payload. Specifically:

public void doFilter(ServletRequest servletRequest, ServletResponse servletResponse,
                     FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
    HttpServletRequest request = (HttpServletRequest) servletRequest;
    LOG.debug("payload: " + requestWrapper.getRequestBody());

and `web.xml`:

<filter>
    <filter-name>PayloadLoggingFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>com.host.PayloadLoggingFilter</filter-class>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>PayloadLoggingFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/resources/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

Problem

I've managed to enable access logging in Tomcat by editing the conf/server.xml and uncommenting the entry for the org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve Valve. I'd like to be able to dump the contents of POST's payload. It doesn't seem like any of the options in the pattern will do this. Is there a built in way to do this? Do I use the AccessLogValve?

Original source