Re: RequestDispatcher and relative locations

From:

Lew <lew@nospam.lewscanon.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 18:58:33 -0400

Message-ID:

<heWdnQq-uYIH2v7bnZ2dnUVZ_hGdnZ2d@comcast.com>

Lew wrote:

I routinely write web apps where servlets forward to JSPs, and relative references always work fine.

Skijor wrote:

I think it may have something to do with the fact that my css [sic] and
images directory was under WEB-INF.

Now that you tell us this rather important bit of news things are much more
explicable.

Tomcat doesn't allow urls [sic] that request resources inside this directory so my guess is that the
relavie references were failing because of this but it's just a

No wonder your "<%= getContextPath() %>" scriptlet didn't help.

guess. I changed my code so that index.jsp is the default page and I
noticed that this file was not able to load references to css when it
was inside WEB-INF so I move both css/ and images/ out of WEB-INF and
into web and it worked.

The reason you could get your page from WEB-INF/ is that access is through a
servlet forward. The reason that you couldn't get your CSS from WEB-INF/ was
that access was through a URL.

My guess is that if I go back to using my servlet as the default resource it will work now if I forward the
request to index.jsp or some other .jsp file. I'm not sure I want to
go back tho'.

There are a lot of good reasons to use a servlet to mediate view and logic
dispatch. Check out "Model-View-Controller" (MVC) and "Front Controller pattern".

--
Lew