How to get the raw data posted to a Java Servlet

While working in porting GeneCMS to Google App Engine and Silverlight, I stumble at one annoying problem: how to get the raw data that was sent by the browser via a POST. In this GeneCMS port, the silverlight client actually generates all the HTML that the server used to generate. The raw generated HTML is then sent to the GAE application, with some metadata about the generated pages. The GAE servlet then reads the posted data as a string and extract the individual generated pages. Each generated page is then saved into the GAE database to allow the CMS to server the pages.

After tweking around in the wrong places, I finally found out that HttpServletRequest’s getInputStream method is an input stream to the raw data posted. So I modified my servlet to get the POST data into a string like this:

String posted_data = "";
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
				request.getInputStream()));
String line = in.readLine();
while (line != null) {
	posted_data += line;
	line = in.readLine();
}

The above code gave me exactly what I needed.