forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

["Michael P. Soulier" <mi...@mitel.com>]

Hello,

I didn't find this in the archives, so I'll ask.

I have a tomcat app deployed via proxypass from apache (2 in fact, a 
double-proxy through 2 servers). It needs to use relative paths in its 
links to ensure that the composed path is correct. Unfortunately struts 
doesn't seem to want to use relative links.

So,
1. Is there a way to make it use a relative link instead of an absolute one?
2. Is there a way to force a prefix on the link?

Basically, the tomcat app is deployed as application "me". Instead of 
links like

/me

I want

/foo/bar/me

Is this possible?

Thanks,
Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <mi...@mitel.com>, 613-592-2122 x2522
Linux applications development
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount of
nerd-like effort." -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix

Re: forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

[Ognjen Blagojevic <og...@etf.bg.ac.yu>]

Max Cooper wrote:
>>>It sounds like your main challenge is that you have requests to a web
>>>server that look like http://web.domain.com/foo/bar/me mapped to an app
>>>deployed on an app server that you might access directly as
>>>http://app.domain.com/me. The app will make site-root relative URLs
>>>like /me/foo.html, and the browser will them make a request to the web
>>>server like http://web.domain.com/me/foo.html which is not what you
>>>want.
>>
>>That is correct. 

(I don't have the original message, so I answer to this one)

I have similar problem like you. Applications are deployed as 
http://app1.domain.com/ and http://app2.domain.com/ for 
production use, and developers deploy them to local Tomcats as 
http://localhost:8080/app1/ and http://localhost:8080/app2/.

I found the solution in <html:rewrite> tag, since it will convert 
the relative path in JSP to the absolute one. It also does the 
URL-rewriting, but I don't mind that.

Did anyone else try this solution?



Ognjen

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Re: forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

[Max Cooper <ma...@maxcooper.com>]

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 16:51 -0500, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> On 13/12/05 Max Cooper did say:
> 
> > It sounds like your main challenge is that you have requests to a web
> > server that look like http://web.domain.com/foo/bar/me mapped to an app
> > deployed on an app server that you might access directly as
> > http://app.domain.com/me. The app will make site-root relative URLs
> > like /me/foo.html, and the browser will them make a request to the web
> > server like http://web.domain.com/me/foo.html which is not what you
> > want.
> 
> That is correct. 
> 
> > What is stopping you from deploying the app with a "/foo/bar/me"
> > context, so that it matches the "public" context on the web server? This
> > is almost certainly the easiest solution if you can do it.
> 
> In this case, http://web.domain.com/foo is a prefix for a lot of UI
> elements that are pluggable for separate applications. That would mean
> that if /foo became a web application in tomcat, it would be much more
> difficult for applications to plug-in to it. If each application
> delivered a .war file, as a separate web application, that would be far
> easier to maintain in the long run than requiring all developers to
> coexist in one large web app under tomcat. 

I am not following why you can't make the "context path" (whether it is
a webapp or not) the same on your app server as it is on the web server,
e.g. http://web.com/foo --proxy--> http://app.com/foo, rather that
http://web.com/foo --proxy--> http://app.com/something/else. This really
would solve all of your problems -- perhaps it is worth further
consideration, even if you have to change some paths to make it work.

Note that I think you can deploy completely separate webapps to the
following seemingly-nested paths, if this is the problem:
/foo
/foo/bar
/foo/bar/baz

Or how about setup another virtual host on tomcat, with the app (or
whatever it is) deployed with a context path that matches the path on
the public web server.

> > Alternately, perhaps there is some proxy configuration magic that would
> > work. To be robust, you'd probably need to use a connector (e.g. mod_jk)
> > rather than just using a "dumb" proxy to forward requests, because I
> > think the app server really needs to know the desired context path in
> > order to render the pages with the proper URLs. (The alternative of
> > filtering the response stream after-the-fact in hopes of converting all
> > URLs is a lousy design for many reasons and not an approach I would
> > recommend.)
> 
> I'm currently using ProxyPass in apache, but if this can be done with
> mod_jk, then I'll focus on that. Do you know it's possible with AJP?

I was hoping that I would see config items to address this, but I didn't
see any when reviewing the docs. I guess it doesn't do it, at least not
alone. Maybe it could be combined with mod_rewrite in some novel way to
solve this problem, but I don't know how to do it.

I do like using mod_jk (and similar for components other app servers)
since they handle things (e.g. redirect URLs) that can be a pain to
setup in a proxy and/or pain to work around with app code. Basically,
they give you a solid base to build on, without a bunch of surprising
proxy-related gotchas to work around in the app code.


Be a little more specific about your situation -- I think that might
help someone recognize a problem they had and offer you a solution. You
can obviously obscure the particulars while still communicating the
structure of your problem in sufficient detail. So far, I don't really
get what your situation is beyond "path on web server doesn't match
context path on app server".

-Max


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Re: forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

["Michael P. Soulier" <mi...@mitel.com>]

On 13/12/05 Max Cooper did say:

> It sounds like your main challenge is that you have requests to a web
> server that look like http://web.domain.com/foo/bar/me mapped to an app
> deployed on an app server that you might access directly as
> http://app.domain.com/me. The app will make site-root relative URLs
> like /me/foo.html, and the browser will them make a request to the web
> server like http://web.domain.com/me/foo.html which is not what you
> want.

That is correct. 

> What is stopping you from deploying the app with a "/foo/bar/me"
> context, so that it matches the "public" context on the web server? This
> is almost certainly the easiest solution if you can do it.

In this case, http://web.domain.com/foo is a prefix for a lot of UI
elements that are pluggable for separate applications. That would mean
that if /foo became a web application in tomcat, it would be much more
difficult for applications to plug-in to it. If each application
delivered a .war file, as a separate web application, that would be far
easier to maintain in the long run than requiring all developers to
coexist in one large web app under tomcat. 

> Alternately, perhaps there is some proxy configuration magic that would
> work. To be robust, you'd probably need to use a connector (e.g. mod_jk)
> rather than just using a "dumb" proxy to forward requests, because I
> think the app server really needs to know the desired context path in
> order to render the pages with the proper URLs. (The alternative of
> filtering the response stream after-the-fact in hopes of converting all
> URLs is a lousy design for many reasons and not an approach I would
> recommend.)

I'm currently using ProxyPass in apache, but if this can be done with
mod_jk, then I'll focus on that. Do you know it's possible with AJP?

> Using context-relative references is really useful. Actions have the
> same name (path) no matter what page you are working on. Images are
> always "/img/..." (or whatever) without having to think twice what the
> request URL was that caused the JSP you are editing to execute (note
> that the request may not match the JSP file path). And you can choose
> (and change) the context path at deployment time without breaking
> anything.
> 
> However, if you are dead set on using strictly relative references, you
> may still be able to get it to work. I am pretty sure I have seen
> <html:form action="relative.do"> work, for instance. Why don't you post
> a specific example of something that isn't working for you.

I tried that, but I couldn't get the existing web application to load
once I'd made those changes. Perhaps I did it wrong. 

Mike
-- 
Michael P. Soulier <mi...@mitel.com>, 613-592-2122 x2522
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a
touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
--Albert Einstein

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Re: forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

[Max Cooper <ma...@maxcooper.com>]

Note that Struts isn't writing absolute URLs. As a webapp developer, you
use "context-relative references" that Struts turns into "site-root
relative" URLs. Here are examples of each type of reference, just so we
are all on the same page:

Relative: foo.html

Site-root relative: /myapp/foo.html

(And the special case of context-relative /foo.html inside an app, which
then becomes /myapp/foo.html if you deploy this app with a /myapp
context path.)

Absolute: http://server.com/bar.html


It sounds like your main challenge is that you have requests to a web
server that look like http://web.domain.com/foo/bar/me mapped to an app
deployed on an app server that you might access directly as
http://app.domain.com/me. The app will make site-root relative URLs
like /me/foo.html, and the browser will them make a request to the web
server like http://web.domain.com/me/foo.html which is not what you
want.

What is stopping you from deploying the app with a "/foo/bar/me"
context, so that it matches the "public" context on the web server? This
is almost certainly the easiest solution if you can do it.

Alternately, perhaps there is some proxy configuration magic that would
work. To be robust, you'd probably need to use a connector (e.g. mod_jk)
rather than just using a "dumb" proxy to forward requests, because I
think the app server really needs to know the desired context path in
order to render the pages with the proper URLs. (The alternative of
filtering the response stream after-the-fact in hopes of converting all
URLs is a lousy design for many reasons and not an approach I would
recommend.)

Using context-relative references is really useful. Actions have the
same name (path) no matter what page you are working on. Images are
always "/img/..." (or whatever) without having to think twice what the
request URL was that caused the JSP you are editing to execute (note
that the request may not match the JSP file path). And you can choose
(and change) the context path at deployment time without breaking
anything.

However, if you are dead set on using strictly relative references, you
may still be able to get it to work. I am pretty sure I have seen
<html:form action="relative.do"> work, for instance. Why don't you post
a specific example of something that isn't working for you.

-Max

On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 13:52 -0500, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> Laurie Harper wrote:
> > Because if they were relative Struts would have no way to know what they 
> > were relative *to*?
> 
> But why does it need to know? I have links in sites that I look after like
> 
> foo/bar/bash.html
> 
> If I access this via http://mybox.com/, then the browser does the right 
> thing. If it's accessed via http://otherbox.com/, then it still does the 
> right thing. That's why relative links are always recommended.
> 
> Why does Struts need to know? This seems like another case of a 
> shortsighted framework to me, complicating something that would be dead 
> simple if we were simply generating our own html.
> 
> > Maybe inputPattern and/or pagePattern are what you're looking for?
> > 
> > http://struts.apache.org/struts-doc-1.2.7/userGuide/configuration.html#controller_config 
> 
> Maybe. I'll look at this, and thank you.
> 
> Please pardon my exasperation.
> 
> Mike
> 


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Re: forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

["Michael P. Soulier" <mi...@mitel.com>]

Laurie Harper wrote:
> Because if they were relative Struts would have no way to know what they 
> were relative *to*?

But why does it need to know? I have links in sites that I look after like

foo/bar/bash.html

If I access this via http://mybox.com/, then the browser does the right 
thing. If it's accessed via http://otherbox.com/, then it still does the 
right thing. That's why relative links are always recommended.

Why does Struts need to know? This seems like another case of a 
shortsighted framework to me, complicating something that would be dead 
simple if we were simply generating our own html.

> Maybe inputPattern and/or pagePattern are what you're looking for?
> 
> http://struts.apache.org/struts-doc-1.2.7/userGuide/configuration.html#controller_config 

Maybe. I'll look at this, and thank you.

Please pardon my exasperation.

Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <mi...@mitel.com>, 613-592-2122 x2522
Linux applications development
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount of
nerd-like effort." -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix

Re: forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

[Laurie Harper <la...@holoweb.net>]

Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> Michael Jouravlev wrote:
>> Links to what? To action or to JSP page?
> 
> A form action, primarily.
> 
>> I don't think that references below answer your question, but they
>> contain valuable info anyway:
> 
> No, I'm afraid that they don't. I don't need a tag lib to put a <base> 
> tag in the html, but that won't fix the problem that struts, for some 
> inane reason, _requires_ absolute URLs in its config! Why why why??

Because if they were relative Struts would have no way to know what they 
were relative *to*?

Maybe inputPattern and/or pagePattern are what you're looking for?

http://struts.apache.org/struts-doc-1.2.7/userGuide/configuration.html#controller_config

L.


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Re: forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

["Michael P. Soulier" <mi...@mitel.com>]

Michael Jouravlev wrote:
> Links to what? To action or to JSP page?

A form action, primarily.

> I don't think that references below answer your question, but they
> contain valuable info anyway:

No, I'm afraid that they don't. I don't need a tag lib to put a <base> 
tag in the html, but that won't fix the problem that struts, for some 
inane reason, _requires_ absolute URLs in its config! Why why why??

Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <mi...@mitel.com>, 613-592-2122 x2522
Linux applications development
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount of
nerd-like effort." -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix

Re: forcing relative urls from struts instead of the absolute urls!

[Michael Jouravlev <jm...@gmail.com>]

On 12/6/05, Michael P. Soulier <mi...@mitel.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I didn't find this in the archives, so I'll ask.
>
> I have a tomcat app deployed via proxypass from apache (2 in fact, a
> double-proxy through 2 servers). It needs to use relative paths in its
> links to ensure that the composed path is correct. Unfortunately struts
> doesn't seem to want to use relative links.
>
> So,
> 1. Is there a way to make it use a relative link instead of an absolute one?
> 2. Is there a way to force a prefix on the link?

Links to what? To action or to JSP page?

> Basically, the tomcat app is deployed as application "me". Instead of
> links like
>
> /me
>
> I want
>
> /foo/bar/me
>
> Is this possible?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike

I don't think that references below answer your question, but they
contain valuable info anyway:

http://struts.apache.org/struts-taglib/tagreference-struts-html.html#html:base
http://wiki.apache.org/struts/StrutsTaglibHtmlBase

You can roll out your own tag instead of standard <html:base> if needed.

Michael.

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