PhaseListener doesn't return image

Question

Hi Experts,
I have a JackRabbit content repository in my web application which contains some of the images that need to be rendered.
In order to do this I decided to map a URL pattern to a PhaseListener, which will on receiving such a request load the image and return it with the HTTP response.
In other words, if the URL is http://domain.com/images?path=name.jpg the PhaseListener will intercept that and return an image from the JackRabbit content repository. My problem is, even though everything seems fine, I keep on receiving a 404 error. My code is as follow:
public class ImagePhaseListener implement PhaseListener {
  public PhaseId getPhaseId() {
    return PhaseId.RESTORE_VIEW;
  public void beforePhase(PhaseEvent event) {
    // Nothing to do
  public void afterPhase(PhaseEvent event) {
    FacesContext facesContext = event.getFacesContext();
    String viewID = facesContext.getViewRoot().getViewId();
    if (viewID.startsWith("/image/") {
      serveResource(facesContext);
  private void serveResource(FacesContext facesContext) {
    Map<String, String> requestMap = facesContext.getExternalContext().getRequestParameterMap();
    String path = requestMap.get("path");
    // Get the stream from JackRabbit - this works fine
    InputStream imageStream = getImageStream(path);
    // Write the response - this doesn't throw any exception, but doesn't seem to work either
    HttpServletResponse servletResponse = (HttpServletResponse)facesContext.getExternalContext().getResponse();
    servletResponse.setContentType("image/jpeg");
    try {
      int streamLength = imageStream.available();
      servletResponse.setContentLength(streamLength);
      while (streamLength > 0) {
         servletResponse.getOutputStream().write(imageStream.read());
         --streamLength;
       servletResponse.getOutputStream().flush();           
     catch (IOException exception) {
       // Log error
     finally {
       try {
         servletResponse.getOutputStream().close();
         imageStream.close();
      catch (IOException exception) {
        // Log error
    facesContext.responseComplete();
// More code ...
}I used my debugger to step through this and everything works fine - no exceptions nothing. The inputstream is loaded correctly and contains the correct number of bytes. Here is my HTTP headers:
GET /Resources/images?path=test.jpg HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8080
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008111716 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.3
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.x 404 Not Found
X-Powered-By: Servlet/2.5, JSF/1.2
Server: Sun Java System Application Server 9.1_02
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1028
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:25:32 GMTI have no idea why this won't work - any and all help is appreciated.
Btw, what's the best way to write from an InputStream to the Response's OutputStream?
Thank you,
Ristretto

Answer 1

Thanks IoboEsa and BalusC,
BalusC - the reason I tried to get this to work with a JSF PhaseListener is because this would give me easy access to a managed bean containing the user information. I see in your article you recommend passing an ID attribute encrypted by MD5 for authentication, but if this information can be obtained from a JSF bean so much the better, don't you think? I guess I'll try the servlet approach and just construct the FacesContext manually
Thanks,
Ristretto