Question

I have a list of .xhtml pages that I keep in my /src/main/webapp/pages/ folder.
Now I want to create hyperlinks to them. Currently the only one that works is the default home page: /src/main/webapp/pages/default.xhtml.

  <!-- Welcome page -->
  <welcome-file-list>
    <welcome-file>/pages/default.xhtml</welcome-file>
  </welcome-file-list>

  <!-- JSF mapping -->
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
  </servlet>

  <!-- Map these files with JSF -->
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.jsf</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.xhtml</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

For the others, if I have a link such as:

<a href="/pages/page1.xhtml">Page 1</a>

I get the following error:

/page1.xhtml Not Found in
ExternalContext as a Resource

My question is: How do I specify the page I want in a href relative to the webapp root.

Answer 1

Two major things you need to know about relative links (i.e. the ones not starting with http://):

• Relative links starting with a leading slash / are relative to the domain root.
• Relative links without a leading slash are relative to request URL (as it is in browser address bar).

---

If the current URL is http://example.com/app and the page contains a link

<a href="/pages/page1.xhtml">

then it will point to http://example.com/pages/page1.xhtml (fails).

---

If the current URL is http://example.com/app and the page contains a link

<a href="pages/page1.xhtml">

then it will point to http://example.com/app/pages/page1.xhtml (works).

---

If the current URL is http://example.com/app/pages/default.xhtml and the page contains a link

<a href="pages/page1.xhtml">

then it will point to http://example.com/app/pages/pages/page1.xhtml (fails).

---

Your problem is that the welcome page is opened by a forward rather than a redirect. This way the request URL as it is in browser address bar stays on http://example.com/app while it is actually displaying the content of http://example.com/app/pages/default.xhtml. To get the links to work in all circumstances you want a link like

<a href="/app/pages/page1.xhtml">

Thus, including the context path, which is the webapp root. If your sole problem is that you want to include the context path dynamically, then just print HttpServletRequest#getContextPath()

<a href="#{request.contextPath}/pages/page1.xhtml">

See also:

• How to use relative paths without including the context root name?