Pretty Faces EL Injection does not work

Question

I am building an online application in JSF 2 with Primefaces and Spring. I want to use Pretty Faces to make our search urls bookmarkable.

Here is my pretty-config.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<pretty-config xmlns="http://ocpsoft.org/prettyfaces/3.3.3"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://ocpsoft.org/xml/ns/prettyfaces/ocpsoft-pretty-faces-3.3.3.xsd">

    <url-mapping id="index">
        <pattern value="/" />
        <view-id value="/sites/public/template/index.xhtml" />
    </url-mapping>

    <url-mapping id="searchWithParams">
        <pattern value="/search/#{searchView.searchQuery}/#{searchView.searchTags}/#{searchView.searchOrder}" />
        <view-id value="/sites/public/product/productSearch.xhtml" />
    </url-mapping>

    <url-mapping id="searchWithoutParams">
        <pattern value="/search" />
        <view-id value="/sites/public/product/productSearch.xhtml" />
    </url-mapping>

</pretty-config>

Here is my Bean I want to inject in:

@Component
@Scope("request")
public class SearchView {

    private String searchQuery = "";

    private String searchTags = "";

    private String searchOrder = "";


    public SearchView() {
        // void
    }

    public void navigate() {
        String url = "";
        try {
            url =  "/search" + 
                    "/" + URLEncoder.encode(searchQuery, "UTF-8") + 
                    "/" + URLEncoder.encode(searchTags, "UTF-8") + 
                    "/" + URLEncoder.encode(searchOrder, "UTF-8");
        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
            url = "/search";
        }

        try {
            FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().redirect(url);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }


    // Getters and Setters ...

}

Only "/search" works perfectly fine. I also tried changing the order of the mappings in the pretty-config.xml and using dummy values for the other two parameters and only using one parameter. Another thing I tried was to change teh expressions "#{bean.param}" to "#{getParam : bean.param}". Changing the scope of my bean doesn't help either.

On the webpage I use a primefaces commandlink which has "searchView.navigate" as action parameter.

I always get the following error message:

HTTP Status 404 - /search/a/b/c

type Status report

message /search/a/b/c

description The requested resource (/search/a/b/c) is not available.

Answer 1

Definitely having a pattern like /search/#{searchView.searchQuery}/#{searchView.searchTags}/#{searchView.searchOrder} is a bad idea.

Here a quote of my conversation with @Lincon, Prettyfaces team lead :

• Me : And other one, is it possible to add two params in pattern? Like /detail/#{appId}/#{navigationIndex} .
• Lincon : You could certainly create a secondary URL-mapping that would also display the same view-ID, and as long as the parameters are different, eg: One mapping is "/detail" and the other is "/detail/#{appId}", you'll be fine. But if they have the same pattern, you'll have problems.

Personally I don't even use EL expressions into url patterns. I began to use them but they have a big drawback: they force you to specify the url as it is written in the pattern.

For example, having /students/#{studentId} will always force you to specify a student id to reach that page. Otherwise you need to declare a second pattern for the same view-id. Appart from that, a second parameter in the GET request will always force you to use the http standard way to pass the parameters (imagine you want to add a second one, you would need /students/detail/#{studentId}?viewMode=2 , passing them in a different way).

For me is much easier to declare something like /students/detail and after pass the params in the classic (not as pretty) http way: /students/detail?studentId=1&viewMode=2 .