how to forward from the root

Hey guys

This is the issue I have.

I have several apps running on different context.

Like the start pages would be :

http://localhost:8080/music/songs/start.do
http://localhost:8080/movies/startMovie.do

Now whenever I try to forward, it is always relative to the context.

Like from start.do, if I forward, it will always look inside
http://localhost:8080/music/songs/

Similarly from startMovie.do, if I forward, it will look in
http://localhost:8080/movies/

But what if I want to forward to a resource at the root level
http://localhost:8080/error.html

I know I can do something like this from StartAction (start.do)

ActionForward forward = new ActionForward();
forward.setPath("../../error.html");
forward.setRedirect(true);
return forward;

And from startMovie.do
ActionForward forward = new ActionForward();
forward.setPath("../error.html");
forward.setRedirect(true);
return forward;

But this wont work. Because I wont know whether to use a ../ or a ../../

Isnt there a simple way to forward from the root level.

Thanks
Sarah

What is your web context root? Is it "/"? Are we talking about a single Struts application or multiple applications? If it's a single application, are there multiple modules?
[ August 02, 2006: Message edited by: Merrill Higginson ]

Thanks for your reply.

There are multiple struts applications. Well Actually I'm not sure whether you call them as different struts modules or struts applications.

Say there is a domain called www.abc.com
Now under this domain several departments have their own struts websites.

Like department1's website is accessed through
www.abc.com/department1/something
Similarly department2's website is accessed through
www.abc.com/department2/dept2/something (it might be like 2 levels down).

So the root is www.abc.com
So in the root say we have a file like
www.abc.com/error.html

And I want to forward to this error.html, from
www.abc.com/department1/something
or from
www.abc.com/department2/dept2/something

But I dont want to forward using absolute path like
ActionForward forward = new ActionForward();
forward.setPath("http://www.abc.com/error.html");
forward.setRedirect(true);
return forward;

Thanks

Yes, it's possible to set up a forward to a "root" page like this. It's still considered a forward outside the application, though. Because of this, you cannot use a context relative reference. You must enter the full URL.

So, here is the forward you'd set up:

<forward name="error" path="http://www.abc.com/error.html" redirect="true" />

Thanks Merill

The problem is I'm not going to be hardcoding the forwards in the struts-config.

If this was not a struts application, is it possible to redirect without using absolute path, by using requestDispatcher.sendRedirect.

Thanks

There's no way around it. Even with response.sendRedirect() you have to specify the full URL if you're going outside the current application.

One possible workaround, though, would be to use the HttpServletReqeust object's getRequestURL() method to get the URL sent to the web container to reach the current action. You could easily develop a utility that would parse through this String, extract the server portion of the URL, and append it to the relative path you might send in as a parameter.

thanks for your help merill
appreciate it