Question

I have just started learning about Java server faces and successfully tested out my first web app in JSF.

What puzzles me is that the navigation rules are specified in my faces-config.xml located in my WEB-INF folder and no where in my web.xml have i specified the location of my faces-config.xml file location.

So how does navigation take place ?

Answer 1

The JSF 1.2 specification (JSR 252) requires any JSF implementation to automatically load /WEB-INF/faces-config.xml at startup (if such a resource exists).

Quoting the section 10.4.2 Application Startup Behavior:

At application startup time, before
any requests are processed, the JSF
implementation must process zero or
more application configuration
resources, located according to the
following algorithm:

• Search for all resources named “META-INF/faces-config.xml” in the
  ServletContext resource paths for
  this web application, and load each as
  a JSF configuration resource (in
  reverse order of the order in which
  they are returned by
  getResources() on the current
  Thread’s ContextClassLoader).
• Check for the existence of a context initialization parameter named
  javax.faces.CONFIG_FILES. If it
  exists, treat it as a comma-delimited
  list of context relative resource
  paths (starting with a “/”), and load
  each of the specfied resources.
• Check for the existence of a web application configuration resource
  named “/WEB-INF/faces-config.xml”,
  and load it if the resource exists.