What's going on? Servlet mapped: "/" now can't find any images/stylesheets!

[Robert Paris]

I mapped my servlet to "/" and now no images or stylesheets can be found. Why is it grabbing every single request to the website? I only wanted it to grab "/" requests, but now it grabs ANY AND ALL requests to anything!

[Frank Carver]

Ah, that's an old chestnut.
The spec (still, as of 2.3, at least) implies that a URL pattern ending with '/' is treated as a prefix, and thus a pattern of '/' matches anything and everything.
The usual way to solve it is to define a "welcome-file" in your web.xml which will handle the case of the user supplying just the '/', then map your active content to something else eg.
web.xml:

<web-app>
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>Friki</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.efsol.friki.FrikiServlet</servlet-class>
  </servlet>
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>Friki</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/view</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>
  <welcome-file-list>
    <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
  </welcome-file-list>
  
</web-app>

Then put an "instant redirect" into your welcome file:
index.html

<meta http-equiv='refresh' content='0;url=view'/>

This works for me. Apparently in version 2.4 of the servlet API, you can directly specify a servlet as the "welcome-file", so you don't need the jiggery-pokery with the redirect.
I do really wish there was a way of specifying an "exclude pattern" of some sort, so I could say "send everything to my servlet, except URLs beginning with '/images'". Sigh.

[Mark Howard]

Frank
Is the web.xml file that you're updating the one in the default ROOT directory, or the one specific to your web app?
I essentially want a url of www.mysite.com to fire up a specific servlet in my web application.
I thought I could simply create an index.jsp file that merely forwarded the request to the desired servlet, and get the welcome-file to point to the index.jsp file.
But when I type in www.mysite.com I still end up with the default Tomcat index.jsp file
Something is obviously in the wrong place. Can you help?
Thanks a mil
Mark.

[Sam Walker]

I don�t know if this applies to your situation but here is my two cents. If you�re deploying under apache your index.jsp will not get picked up. In that case you need to redirect your request to index.jsp from index.html.