How to access static resources when mapping a glob

Question

I've mapped the Spring MVC dispatcher as a global front controller servlet on /*.

<servlet>       
  <servlet-name>home</servlet-name>         
  <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>     
</servlet>  
<servlet-mapping>       
  <servlet-name>home</servlet-name>         
  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>     
</servlet-mapping>

However, this mapping stops the access to static files like CSS, JS, images etc which are all in the /res/ folder.

How can I access them anyway?

Answer 1

Add the folders which you don't want to trigger servlet processing to the <static-files> section of your appengine-web.xml file.

I just did this and looks like things are starting to work ok. Here's my structure:

/

/pages/<.jsp files>

/css

I added "/pages/**" and "/css/**" to the <static-files> section and I can now forward to a .jsp file from inside a servlet doGet without causing an infinite loop.

Answer 2

What you do is add a welcome file in your web.xml

<welcome-file-list>
    <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>

And then add this to your servlet mappings so that when someone goes to the root of your application, they get sent to index.html internally and then the mapping will internally send them to the servlet you map it to

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>MainActions</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/main</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>MainActions</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/index.html</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

End result: You visit /Application, but you are presented with /Application/MainActions servlet without disrupting any other root requests.

Get it? So your app still sits at a sub url, but automatically gets presented when the user goes to the root of your site. This allows you to have the /images/bob.img still go to the regular place, but '/' is your app.

Answer 3

If you use Tomcat, you can map resources to the default servlet:

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/static/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

and access your resources with url http://{context path}/static/res/...

Also works with Jetty, not sure about other servlet containers.

Answer 4

After trying the filter approach without success (it did for some reason not enter the doFilter() function) I changed my setup a bit and found a very simple solution for the root serving problem:

Instead of serving " / * " in my main Servlet, I now only listen to dedicated language prefixes "EN", "EN/ *", "DE", "DE/ *"

Static content gets served by the default Servlet and the empty root requests go to the index.jsp which calls up my main Servlet with the default language:

< jsp:include page="/EN/" /> (no other content on the index page.)

Answer 5

In Embedded Jetty I managed to achieve something similar by adding a mapping for the "css" directory in web.xml. Explicitly telling it to use DefaultServlet:

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>DefaultServlet</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.DefaultServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>DefaultServlet</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/css/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Answer 6

I found a simpler solution with a dummy index file.

Create a Servlet (or use the one you wanted to respond to "/") which maps to "/index.html" (Solutions mentioned here use the mapping via XML, I used the 3.0 version with annotation @WebServlet) Then create a static (empty) file at the root of the static content named "index.html"

I was using Jetty, and what happened was that the server recognized the file instead of listing the directory but when asked for the resource, my Servlet took control instead. All other static content remained unaffected.