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20030919 Friday September 19, 2003

Vanity URLs in Struts I figured out a way to make your Struts' app have URLs like the following: 

http://raibledesigns.com/weblog?method=edit
http://raibledesigns.com/weblog.jsp?method=edit
http://raibledesigns.com/weblog.html?method=edit
http://raibledesigns.com/weblog.php?method=edit
http://raibledesigns.com/weblog.asp?method=edit

Might be a nifty little trick to try. Pump out a version of Roller with this feature enabled and you could say you made a .NET version! ;-)

Here's how: 

1.  I created a RequestFilter that maps to /*
2.  This filter checks to see if request.getServletPath() matches any of the
action paths in struts-config.xml.  If so, it forwards to the action.
3.  As an added feature, I added a set of allowed extensions to this
filter's init parameters.  So far I have .jsp,.html,.asp,.cfm (using .jsp
ensures no one links to them directly, MVC enforced!) - so marketing can
choose what technology they want to convey ;-)

This seems to work great.  For example, I have an "advancedSearch" action
defined as follows:

    <action path="/advancedSearch"
      type="org.apache.struts.actions.ForwardAction" 
      parameter=".advancedSearch"/>

(ForwardAction will eventually be replaced, if necessary, with a real
action).  This allows all of the following URLs to work:

http://site.com/do/advancedSearch (works with Struts by default)
http://site.com/advancedSearch
http://site.com/advancedSearch.html + all other extensions listed.

More information (including source code) can be found on the struts-user mailing list. Posted in Java at Sep 19 2003, 06:23:24 PM MDT 2 Comments

Comments:

Hey Matt! Did you see my post not too long ago about a similar subject? I think your solution might be Tomcat specific as I was not able to convince Orion Server to map /* without screwing up the .jsp mapping. http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1004094.html . If I tried to map everything (/*) when the request tried to process a .jsp, it would then loop back around to the controller and I'd get a stack overflow error. No amount of playing would fix this. In Tomcat, however, you can manually map *.jsp to Jasper before the /* and it'll respect the mapping. Is that what you're doing? Anyways, My solution involved RegEx which allowed a bit more flexibility in the URLs so you could do things like 20030921.html which would map to an arbitrary action. Not sure about its performance yet, but it works quite well on my desktop ;-) -Russ

Posted by Russ on September 21, 2003 at 11:13 AM MDT #

I don't believe my implementation is Tomcat specific. It basically will only forward to existing servlets (actions) that are defined in struts-config.xml.

Posted by Matt Raible on September 21, 2003 at 10:27 PM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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