newbie question: default view?

[Edgar Castanedo]

Hi. I am new to JSF. I am currently reading the JSF documentation on the Sun website. I have tried to create a default page for all navigation cases, so I did something like this:

<faces-config xmlns="http://java.sun.com/JSF/Configuration">
 
<navigation-rule>
<navigation-case>
<to-view-id>index.jsp</to-view-id>
</navigation-case>
</navigation-rule>

</faces-config>

For some reason though, no matter what URL I try and reach, I get a 404 error like the following:

If I try and access test.do it gives me a test.jsp (404) not found error.

Does that make sense? Does JSF try and load a file with the same name as call I made, but replaces '.do' with '.jsp'?

If so, how would I achieve the behavior I want with JSF? I have looked (almost) everywhere and it seems like what I have above is the way to do it in JSF, but it doesn't seem to work for me.

I am coming from Spring and Struts so I am not completely new to MVC frameworks. I also have some knowledge on JSF now, since I have been reading about it, but nothing I have seen so far has given me any indication that I could do what I want, other than the snippet that I provided above.

Thanks in Advance!

[Edgar Castanedo]

Okay, so upon further investigation it does seem that there is a whole default suffix thing that will replace '.do' with '.jsp'.

That makes sense now. I guess I would really just now like to know how I can make every default call to <something>.do go to index.jsp. Is that even possible?

[Rajeev Ravindran]

you need to modify url-pattern in your web.xml

Thanks,
[ December 12, 2006: Message edited by: Rajeev Ravindran ]

[Edgar Castanedo]

Maybe I am trying to do something that JSF was not meant for. What I am trying to do is create a way to always have any call to *.do (which is currently mapped to JSF) to resolve to the same JSP file (index.jsp)... always.

I don't want to have to create a jsp file for each and every *.do.

My index.jsp is like a template file that then acts like a view resolver using the * of *.do.

Does that make sense?

[Edgar Castanedo]

I have another question, are there any good view/template technologies for JSF? Is there anything built in or something open source? I do not want to use tiles, as I am trying to move away from any struts dependencies.