is it good to use a path inside jsp starting with WEB-INF?

[Tiya Khambadkone]

I said urgent because I have this issue and needs to be fixed immediately.

I have a jsp which is in some folder outside WEB-INF. This is my project structure and I can not change it.
Now this jsp contains something like :

<%@ include file= "../something.inc"

This file .inc resides inside WEB-INF/somefolder/.

I get 'included file not found' exception.

So is it a good idea to give the path like :
<%@ include file= "/WEB-INF/somefolder/something.inc"

OR

I should just copy something.inc file to the location where my jsp is orginally trying to find ?


This will be deployed on a production environment. So I hope it does not create any problem.

[Bear Bibeault]

Using the path starting with "/WEB-INF" is vastly preferred over using page-relative paths starting with "..".

Do not just start copying files around. That'd just likely lead to a big old mess!

[Tiya Khambadkone]

Thanks for the quick response and I will make sure next time I don't use uregent,etc. words.

Why is WEB-INF usage preferred ?

Isn't using relative path better than absolute ?

[Bear Bibeault]

Tiya Khambadkone wrote:Isn't using relative path better than absolute ?

The path starting with "/WEB-INF'" is relative. An absolute path starts with the protocol (e.g. http: or https:)

But there are a number of types of relative paths, each of which may be required or preferred in different situations:

server-relative path, starts with the context path. Preferred for URLs initiated from the browser (e.g. images, script files, stylesheets, form actions, and so on).

context-relative path, starts with "/" and is relative to the context base. The path starting with "/WEB-INF" is a good example. Preferred for paths used on the server for resources within the same web app (includes, forwards, etc).

page-relative path, relative to the current URL path. Anything that starts with "." or ".." or a file or folder name relative to the current path. These are fragile because they are relative to something that may change (current path) and should not be used in Java web applications. (The one exception is paths within stylesheets which cannot be easily prefixed programmatically with the context path.)

The path starting with ".." is a page-relative path and should not be used.

[Bear Bibeault]

This comes up enough that I've gone ahead and created a new entry in the JSP FAQ to cover it.

[Tiya Khambadkone]

Thanks for the reply. Highly appreciated .