JSF keeps appending the context root directory in navigation rules

[Elie Steckruebe]

Hello,

I have my application in webapps/songcrit. I have Apache hpptd set up with a virtual host to send www.songcrit.com to that directory. But jsf keeps sending back the results of navigation rules with the songcrit directory attached so if it's supposed to direct to http://www.songcrit.com/user.jsf, it directs to http://www.songcrit.com/songcrit/user.jsf. And of course that doesn't exist, so I get a 404 error.

If you get there by going to http://www.onlinehomepoker.com/songcrit/ then it works.

Anyone know how to solve this?

[Tim Holloway]

The JSF navigation rules are not general URL rules. They are only designed to navigate within the webapp and not to external sites or other arbitrary destinations.

In order to navigate to external sites, you should either use a JSF outputLink element, the new link tag introduced in JSF2, or an HTTP redirect (NOT a JSF redirect!)

[Elie Steckruebe]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply, but I am trying to navigate within the webapp as described above.

[Tim Holloway]

webapps/songcrit is not a "directory" according the the server's configuration, it is the physical location of a deployed exploded WAR and as such is only indirectly associated with a URL.

J2EE permits the deployment of multiple webapps within a server, but the only way that the server can tell which webapp to dispatch a given URL to is by looking at the context path part of the URL. The context path is the fragment of the URL that the server has associated with the webapp; by default, if you deploy a webapp in the webapps/songcrit directory of a Tomcat server and do not supply an explicit context path, Tomcat will default the context URL to be "http://hostname:port/songcrit", using the appropriate hostname and the default port of 8080.

Thus, the "songcrit" context name is not optional. Without it, the J2EE server cannot route the request properly. At best, it will route to the default webapp (if any) for that server, and not to the songcrit app.

With apache running the front-end, you can give the illusion of removing "songcrit" from the URL, but you have to use mod_proxy or mod_jk to proxy the requests to Tomcat. Simply rewriting the incoming URLs isn't sufficient.

[Elie Steckruebe]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply. Maybe this is becoming less of a JSF question, but here is the section from my httpd.conf

Am I doing things right here? If not how can I fix it? If so, where do you think the problem lies.

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.onlinehomepoker.com
ServerAlias onlinehomepoker.com *.onlinehomepoker.com
#APP
ProxyPass        / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.songcrit.com
ServerAlias songcrit.com *.songcrit.com
#APP
ProxyPass        / http://127.0.0.1:8080/songcrit/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/songcrit/
</VirtualHost>

I have searched Google endlessly for days on this issue. I can't believe no one has had this problem before. Surely other people host multiple sites on their servers and don't want their to be a directory name in the URL...

[Tim Holloway]

You're using the wrong port, I do believe. For mod_proxy, the default port is 8009, not 8080. It's not just redirecting, it's tunnelling.

[Elie Steckruebe]

Hi,

changing the port just made it stop working completely.

I wrote a custom view handler to try to fix the problem. This makes the outcome correct for the dynamic link on the page but... the postbacks still don't work.

It tries to send me to http://127.0.0.1:8080/user.jsf instead of http://www.songcrit.com/user.jsf


Here is my getActionURL:

	  public String getActionURL(FacesContext context, String viewId)
	  {
	    String actionURL = defaultHandler.getActionURL(context, viewId);
	    
	    String retval = actionURL.replace("songcrit/", "");
	    return retval;
	  }

[Tim Holloway]

I fat-fingered the port ID. It should have been 8109. It's marked as the "ajp" port in Tomcat's server.xml file.

[Elie Steckruebe]

Hi,

actually it turns out it was 8009 as you originally stated but I forgot to change http: to ajp:

However, fixing that issue just made it go back to doing the same thing that was originally the problem, so I'm using ajp now, but it didn't solve anything

[Elie Steckruebe]

Fixed... kind of.

Ok, here's what I had to do in case anyone else has this problem:

RewriteEngine On
rewritecond $1 !^songcrit/
rewriterule ^/(.*)$ /songcrit/$1 [PT]  

#APP
ProxyPass        / ajp://127.0.0.1:8009/
ProxyPassReverse / ajp://127.0.0.1:8009/

the context root directory still appears in the url sometimes, but it works either way now, so that's good enough.

[Tim Holloway]

Actually, mine look more like this:

SSLProxyEngine on
ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8109/WMS-tomcat/
ProxyPassReverse / ajp://localhost:8109/WMS-tomcat/

Where "WMS-tomcat" is the application's context root.

[Elie Steckruebe]

No idea why the same exact thing didn't work for me. Weird.

At least I found something that works acceptably. ...after spending as much time troubleshooting this one problem as writing the application.