What is DelegatingFilterProxy in Spring Security?

DelegatingFilterProxy is the entry point of Spring Security in a Java web application. It is a generic bean that provides a link between web.xml and application-Context.xml. Spring security uses filters to implement cross-cutting concerns like authentication and authorization.

In Spring security, these filters are also Spring bean so that they can take advantage of Spring's dependency injection features, hence they are declared inside the Spring configuration file and a delegating filter proxy (DelegatingFilterProxy) is declared on their behalf on web.xml as filter as shown below:

<filter>
 <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name> 
 <filter-class> org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy </filter-class> 
</filter> 
<filter-mapping> 
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name> 
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

At runtime, delegating filter proxy delegates HTTP requests to a bean class for filtering.

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