Question

i’m trying to find a way remap a path to an absolute one in order to retrieve images stored in the server filesystem, i’m also using spring mvc but the <mvc:resource> can’t map absolute paths, and i can’t find a nice way to do this with spring controllers

i.e. I need to map all the image requests from /images/** to /root/var/img/**, in this way when a client browser try to load an image of the page, every images stays in the path above mentioned

Answer 1

You can create a new context with docBase referencing to your folder (/root/var/img) It should look like this:

<Context path=”/images” docBase=”/root/var/img/” ... >
</Context>

Refer to Tomcat context configuration documentation for more details (e.g., for Tomcat 6: Apache Tomcat Configuration Reference: The Context Container).

Introduction to this document lists possible places where context elements can be defined.

EDIT

As I mentioned in comments, Spring-specific way to do this without creating any new context seems to be using RedirectView (link to Spring v2.5 JavaDoc). According to JavaDoc:

“View that redirects to an absolute, context relative, or current
request relative URL, by default exposing all model attributes as HTTP
query parameters.”

EDIT2

It seems I’ve misunderstood RedirectView purpose, which is a good old URL redirection. Thus, answer by @Jens should be more appropriate (+1). I still wonder if there’s an existing standard solution in Spring (what I originally thought RedirectView would do..) It’s not like there’s much code to write, but still 🙂

EDIT3
After reading more on this topic, I found out that <mvc:resources> is able to do this (i.e., mapping resource using not only relative path, or classpath), you just need to correctly configure location using file: prefix . In fact, there’s already answer on SO that explains exactly what you need to do: Spring : serving static resources outside context root