Web application and web.xml

Question

i have a web application consisting of 1 servlet and 5 jsps.
the start point would be index.jsp
i use firmwide login page. after login, i want the browser to display index.jsp page.
In web.xml, i have defined -
<welcome-file-list>          <welcome-file>/jsp/index.jsp</welcome-file>     </welcome-file-list>       <servlet>        <servlet-name>UtilitiesServlet</servlet-name>        <servlet-class>com.gs.fw.sox404.utilities.UtilitiesServlet</servlet-class>             <init-param>             <param-name>util-log4j-init-file</param-name>             <param-value>/WEB-INF/classes/util_log4j.properties</param-value>          </init-param>        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>    </servlet>     <servlet-mapping>        <servlet-name>UtilitiesServlet</servlet-name>        <url-pattern>/UtilitiesServlet</url-pattern>    </servlet-mapping>if i define it as just index.jsp in the welcome file list, after successful login, it displays the dir structure of the web app.
if i define it as jsp/index.jsp, then in some of the pages, it tries to find the servlet inside jsp folder.
What would be the best way to get around this?

Answer 1

Well, yes, it's not able to find it because you've not understood the mechanism of how it works clearly. You have to put your welcome file under every directory you want it to be used from. Like I said, it's not a path, it's a filename. So if the container sees that your request URL is for a directory, it'll look for the welcome files from the welcome file list, one by one, in the order of declaration. Whichever one it finds first, it'll serve that. If it doesn't find any, then it'll either give a 404 or a directory listing depending on the server and it's settings.
So your problem is that you've put your index.jsp in your JSP folder but expect it to be served for all URLs. That won't happen, you'll have to put one file named index.jsp into every directory. The reasoning is pretty simple, what if you want different behaviour for each folder?
This should fix your problem :)
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