web.xml welcome-file with subfolders

Question

Assuming I have the following folder structure in a project:

webapp
|-admin
|--adminfile1.xhtml
|--adminfile2.xhtml
|-user
|--userfile1.xhtml
|--userfile2.xhtml
|login.xhtml

in my web.xml I have this definition for the welcome-file

<welcome-file-list>
    <welcome-file>login.xhtml</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>

I want the web.xml welcome file to always point at the index.xhtml file, but if I call http://webappname/admin/ the server tries to call http://webappname/admin/index.xhtml instead of http://webappname/index.xhtml

so I tried it with a / for the first char, to search in the root folder. The web.xml looks like this:

<welcome-file-list>
    <welcome-file>/login.xhtml</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>

But now it searches for http://webappname//admin//login.xhtml

How can I call the file in the root folder? Isn't there a solution for doing this? Do I have to put redirects in every folder to get my result?

Answer 1

AFAIK looking for a file index.xxx (xxx being a container specific extension, xhtml i your case) is default behavior if just a folder is provided in the url. The welcome file would be used if the user didn't provide any further information than that the application should be accessed.

Thus http://webappname/ should resolve to the welcome file while http://webappname/admin/ would resolve to admin/index.xhtml .

You could use a global rewriting to redirect the user to the welcome file, either by using an external webserver like Apache with mod_rewrite or an internal url rewriting like the Tuckey URL Rewriting library .

Btw, since your welcome file is called login.xhtml , shouldn't the user always be redirected when she's not logged in?

Answer 2

You need to keep login.html in admin directory also.Since you are requesting admin directory using http://webappname/admin/ .With this request,server first try to check the specified welcome file in admin directory.

This happen because "welcome-file" is internally implemented to fetch
     from the user requested directory level instead of Web application directory  level.

Note:

A welcome-file value cannot start or end with a slash, and they will be picked in the order they appear in the deployment descriptor