Craig McClanahan wrote:
On 12/20/05, Laurie Harper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So I'm pretty much sold on migrating from Struts/JSPs to JSF at this
point, with one remaining caveat I've yet to figure out. I've brought
this up before, but haven't found a good solution yet. I think the
easiest way to get what I want is to use struts-faces, but then I can't
get the benefits of Shale... So, I'd like to revisit the base
requirements to see if anyone can see a way to do what I want w/out
Struts Action / struts-faces in the mix...
My base requirement is that everything be directly addressable by a
bookmark-able URL. So, for example, I'd like to have a URL like
http://.../users to be rendered by /users.jsp as a list of users and,
when you click on an entry in the list, you'd get taken to
http://.../users/bob which would be rendered by /userInfo.jsp. For any
X, the URL http://.../users/X would be rendered by /userInfo.jsp, with X
being made available to the JSP (or backing bean) as a request
parameter, request attribute or whatever.
Using struts-faces, I can get what I want by using wild-card action
mappings to map logical URLs to physical JSPs, passing wild-card matched
parts of the request URL on to the view in the action; something like,
roughly:
<action path="/users/*" type="myaction" forward="/user.jsp">
<set-property name="user" value="{1}"/>
I need a way to get the same mapping from logical URLs to actual JSPs
with vanilla JSF / Shale. Sean suggested I could try writing a custom
navigation handler, but that doesn't seem to work since a navigation
handler only gets to influence how from-view-id/from-outcome pairs get
mapped to views.
I tried setting up a front controller servlet that encapsulates the
URL-to-view mapping logic, but that doesn't work because to-view-id in a
navigation-rule is not a context relative path, so my navigation rules
can't route through my controller servlet...
I'm really hoping I can find a way to do this that doesn't involve
deploying Struts + struts-faces as a front controller to Shale ;-) My
requirements can't be *that* weird can they?
No, you just need a custom NavigationHandler, coupled with using <redirect/>
elements in your navigation rules to ensure that the URLs in the browser are
what you are after. (See also my response to your comment on the myfaces
list too ... view identifiers for the default view handler *are* context
relative paths starting with a '/'.)
Hmm, I'll have to take another look at navigation handlers then. I'll
have to experiment a bit.
The context relative thing is not the behaviour I'm seeing though. If I
have a navigation rule that points to /foo/bar.jsp with redirect set,
the browser is redirected to /faces/foo/bar.jsp. Maybe I can get what I
was shooting for if I switch to suffix mapping for the Faces servlet?
Though based on your comments on the MyFaces list, I tend to agree that
the servlet approach I wanted this for is probably not the best idea...
One consequence of that decision, however, is that you can't pass
information in request scope from one page to another (because the rendering
is done in a separate HTTP request). Here is where Shale's view handler
capabilities can come in handy, however ... if you have such a backing bean
for each JSP page, it's prerender() method will be invoked immediately
before the page is rendered. As such, it is pretty much analogous to a
"setup" action in Struts 1.x based applications, and you can use it to go
collect any model data needed to render this page.
Yep, that's broadly what I was intending on doing.
Thanks,
L.
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