Question

I am having a simple web application which has some static pages. The URL which comes in the browser address bar simply depends on file location in the project.
http://computername:8080/mylogin/ is my home URL.

And below are the few URLs which come when I make a single click on the main home page.

http://computername:8080/mylogin/ssis/api.jsf
http://computername:8080/mylogin/ssis/dev.jsf

I am implementing a breadcrumb. And to generate it I am using javascript by Justin Whitford.
Issue is this breadcrumb uses the browser URL to generate it. So my URL should be in some common fashion/pattern to have breadcrumb implemented properly.

I want to control these URLs. I want to make them like this.
Home: http://myLogin/

sub pages:

http://mylogin/ssis/api/
http://mylogin/ssis/dev/

All this I want to have a proper implementation of breadcrumbs.

Answer 1

You can deploy your webapp to the context root by deleting Tomcat’s default /webapps/ROOT folder altogether and renaming your webapp’s mylogin.war file to ROOT.war.

This way you have http://computername:8080/

You can get rid of port 8080 by configuring Tomcat to listen on default HTTP port 80. Open Tomcat’s /conf/server.xml, locate the <Connector port="8080"> element and edit the port in there.

Now you have http://computername/

You can change the computer name in platform properties or to add a forward in your hosts config file. On Windows, it’s the system32/drivers/etc/hosts file. Just add the following line:

127.0.0.1 mylogin

Now you have http://mylogin/ (note that this works for local environment only!)

As to mapping the individual pages such as /foo.jsf on /foo, you could use a filter for this. It’s a pretty tedious job. Instead of reinventing the wheel you may want to take a look at PrettyFaces.

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It’s only beyond me how exactly changing the hostname, port and context name is related to generating breadcrumbs. You might be exaggerating the concrete problem or using it the wrong way.