[Webwork-devel] Access to the view location

[<Jim...@do...>]

Hi guys,

We are developing a large WebWork app for State government, and it is 
going very well.

We have run into a problem, however, with relative pathing in our web 
pages. In the early stages we successfully used relative pathing to access 
stylesheets and images from our views. Given the simple structure:

    index.html
    css/default.css
    cat/index.html
    dog/index.html

We invoke the actions with a URL like http://host/myapp/dog/myaction.action

The view.properties file contains:
    myaction.action.success=index.html

The file /dog/index.html references the stylesheet as ../css/default.css. 
All is well. Our HTML tools like it, and all works fine.

The problems begin when an action can map to more than one view that may 
be in different directory hierarchies. In this case, an action that is in 
the "root" directory, (ie: http://host/myapp/myaction.action), that forwards to /dog/myaction.action, will end up displaying 
incorrectly because the stylesheet could not be located. The problem is 
that the paths in the resulting view are relative to the browser's URL, in 
this case the action's path.

I have seen some attempts to circumvent this problem by using a redirect 
page or an action. I find this a little cumbersome, especially when form 
parameters need to be passed.

We are trying to circumvent the problem by using the <base href=""/> tag 
in all of our views. This tag is also auto-generated by our action. The 
trick is setting the <base> tag to the URL of the *view*. Unfortunately, 
the action does not currently have any knowledge of the view. To alleviate 
this problem, we added a request property setting to the 
DispatcherServlet:

    aRequest.setAttribute("webwork.view_uri", view);

Will it be possible to add this as a patch to WebWork?

- jim