Question

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

In my Tomcat webapps directory, I have a context, app, that contains in its WEB-INFO/classes directory a tree named test, with a bunch of class files under it. app also contains an html file whose purpose is to collect user input and then invoke one of the servlets in the classes/test directory to generate HTML output. The web.xml describing the servlet is as follows:

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>foo</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>test.DoIt</servlet-class>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>foo</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/doit</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

The body of the html file is

<FORM ACTION="/app/doit">
  First Parameter: <INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="param1">
  <CENTER><INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT"></CENTER>
</FORM>

This all works. But it seems somehow wrong to have to specify the name of the app in the form action of the html file. Is there a way to avoid this, or can someone explain to me why it makes sense that you should have to? Thanks.

Answer 1

If you are disciplined, you don’t have to. Imagine having /app/form.html and /app/doit servlet. Since from the browser perspective they are in the same folder, you can simply say:

<FORM ACTION="doit">

Of course relative paths work as well, e.g. with /app/pages/form.html and /app/servlets/doit you can say:

<FORM ACTION="../servlets/doit">