Re: Dealing with application names in a JEE web app

From:
Lew <noone@lewscanon.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Mon, 23 May 2011 17:02:51 -0400
Message-ID:
<irei1d$j8a$1@news.albasani.net>
You left out too much context.

markspace wrote:

Lew wrote:

markspace wrote:

So how do folks write their apps so that they can handle being
deployed under different names?


Relative URLS.


I found a use-case [sic] where this doesn't work.


No, you didn't. I meant relative to the app context, not with stupid "../"
prefixes.

Templates are used by various other pages in the web app. They have a static
location, but their links are processed as if the template's "location" in the
directory hierarchy was the location of the template client.

Example: I have a template at /rsrc/priv/lnf-template.xhtml which includes
other resources. Abbreviated example:

<LNF-TEMPLATE.XHTML>

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html">

<h:head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<link href="../css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />


What? No!

<link href="/css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Here's a line from one of my own personal facelet projects:
<ui:composition template="/WEB-INF/templates/template.xhtml">

Here are a couple of lines from that template file:

....
   <h:outputStylesheet name="/css/purrtones.css" />
</h:head>
<h:body>
  <t:div>
   <ui:insert name="header">
     <h:graphicImage id="logo" value="/images/Duncan_and_the_purrtones.png"
                     alt="#{bundle.bandname} logo" styleClass="logo"
                     />
   </ui:insert>
....

All those paths are relative to the deployed application name, which is
"/purrtones" by default, but as you say can change. Thus, the image URL
becomes, e.g.,
http://localhost:8080/purrtones/images/Duncan_and_the_purrtones.png
..

<title>
<ui:insert name="title">
Facelets Template
</ui:insert>
</title>
</h:head>

<h:body>
...
</LNF-TEMPLATE.XHTML>

That link href to the style sheet is processed by the client, but the client
could be any page in the directory hierarchy.

For example for a client from the root directory (/readPost.xhtml), that
relative link in the template doesn't work.

<READPOST.XHTML>

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets">

<h:body>
<ui:composition template="/rsrc/priv/lnf-template.xhtml" >


That would translate to "<application-context>/rsrc/priv/lnf-template.xhtml",
and I am having a hard time correlating that to the CSS example above.

Hello from Facelets
</ui:composition>
</h:body>

</html>

</READPOST.XHTML>

Pretty ugly, if you ask me.


I use relative links in templates all the time. But you have to start them
from "/", which translates to the application context root, which is the thing
you're trying not to repeat.

--
Lew
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