Re: [Webwork-devel] Access to the view location

[Rickard <ri...@mi...>]

Jim...@do... wrote:

> 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.


Why don't you invoke the action in the right directory then?


> 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.


You could also reference the CSS by using absolute filenames, but 
generated with the <url> tag so that the context is included.


> 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?

Hm.. maybe, but I want to make sure that this problem cannot be solved 
through other means first.

/Rickard

-- 
Rickard Öberg
Author of "Mastering RMI"
Chief Architect, TheServerSide.com
   The Middleware Company - We Build Experts!