URLChecker¶

URLChecker is an SPI extension point allowing to plug-in a custom URL checker. URL checks can be implemented whenever the code is going to access a location that might be externally provided, either because the input is used provided, or because it’s part of remote access in a distributed system.

public interface URLChecker {

    /** @return URLChecker name that best describes its purpose (e.g. GML Schema evaluator etc) */
    String getName();

    /** @return Boolean flag indicating if this URLChecker should be used */
    boolean isEnabled();

    /**
     * Used to confirm location is allowed for use.
     *
     * <p>URLChecker is used to confirm if a location is allowed for use, returning {@true} when
     * they recognize a location as permitted. Several URLChecker instances are expected to be
     * available, the location will be allowed if at least one URLChecker can confirm it is
     * permitted for use.
     *
     * <p>Location is normalized to remove all redundant {@code .} and {@code ..} path names, and
     * provide absolute file references using empty host name {@code file:///path} approach.
     *
     * @param location Location expressed as normalized URL, URI or path.
     * @return {@code true} indicates the URLChecker can confirm the location is allowed for use,
     *     {@code false} indicates the URLChecker is unable to confirm.
     */
    boolean confirm(String location);
}

Examples of this situation are:

Accessing a remote icon as part of a user provided style (e.g., SLD) or though a dynamic portion of a system provided style (e.g. dynamic symbolizers, general usage of env function in styles).
Accessing a remote style (e.g., dynamic SLD in WMS GetMap).
Accessing a dynamically provided WFS source in WMS “feature portrayal” mode.
Accessing a remote input in a WPS process.

URL checks can be performed using the URLCheckers class, which will look up the plugged in chekers and run them one by one, until one of them accepts the target location, or failing the check if none of them does.

At the time of writing, inside GeoTools remote icon access is the only case where a URL check is performed, but more might be added in the future. More extensive checks are implemented downstreams, in GeoServer, where most of the user provided remote locations are used.

Also, by default, GeoTools contains no URLChecker implementation, meaning that out of the box it will accept any URL. This is done because each implementation will have its own specific requirements to controlling remote access. The downstreams GeoServer project provides an example of how a configurable URLChecker may be implemented.

GeoTools

OSGeo

URLChecker¶