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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T20:45:22+00:00

In my JSF 2.0 Facelets application I have one glorious template that I want

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In my JSF 2.0 Facelets application I have one glorious template that I want all the pages to use. It is in the root directory of the web-app disguised with the name template.xhtml. So it is referenced as you would expect:

<ui:composition template="./template.xhtml">

However I do navigate now and then to client files in sub-directories. It is useful to organize them this way because of different privilege levels. The facelets in those subdirectories would have a reference to the same template like this:

<ui:composition template="../template.xhtml">

So far so good. However in the header of the template I pull in the css like this:

<link href="./resources/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="./resources/css/tableLayout.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="../resources/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="../resources/css/tableLayout.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

The reason for the redundant references is that I haven’t found any other way to get the template to work from the context of the root directory or the sub-directory. A pathname that starts with a / doesn’t work unless you put the application name in it like this

/TheApp-Ver1_0/resources/css/default.css

The problem with this is that the absolute pathname starts with a variable, not a constant. The variable is dependent on how the app is deployed in the container. Is there any clean way of resolving this?

I did some searches to find this question. Honest. However I suspect this is another one of those where BalusC swoops in an provides a link to the blindingly obvious solution extensively discussed somewhere I missed.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The template path in <ui:composition> is relative to the webapp’s own folder structure, not to the domain root (because it does not represent an URL!). So if you start it with /, it’s just resolved relative to the context root.

    <ui:composition template="/WEB-INF/inc/template.xhtml">

    (putting in /WEB-INF has the advantage that the enduser cannot open it directly by guessing the URL)

    The name path of <h:outputStylesheet>, <h:outputScript> and <h:graphicImage> is always relative to /resources root folder, regardless of if you start it with / or not.

    <h:outputStylesheet name="css/default.css" />
<h:outputScript name="js/default.js" />
<h:graphicImage name="img/logo.png" />

    If you want to use plain HTML instead of JSF components to include CSS/JS/images for some reason, then best is to prepend the path with #{request.contextPath} yourself, so that you can make it a domain-relative URL, so that you don’t need to fiddle with context-relative URLs. See also: How get the base URL?

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