jsf linking to a view that uses a template

Question

Hi this is my folder structure:

-Web Pages
 -WEB-INF
   -template.xhtml
 -gebruiker
   -index.xhtml
 -index.xhtml

and now I'm trying to link from index.html to gebruiker/index.xhtml

I do this as follows:

index.xhtml:

<h:form>
    <h:commandButton value="gebruiker" action="#{labelController.gebruiker()}"/> 
</h:form>

bean:

public String gebruiker(){
        return "gebruiker/index";
    }

And if I run this I get a IO.FileNotFoundException without any useful detail...

I know the problem is because the index.xhtml in gebruiker folder uses a template it looks like this:

<ui:composition xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
                xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
                template="./WEB-INF/template.xhtml">

    <ui:define name="title">
        Project Label Configurator
    </ui:define>

    <ui:define name="body">
        GEBRUIKER PAGINA
    </ui:define>

</ui:composition>

When I use plain xhtml instead of composition tags, the mapping works.

Anyone knows why?

my web.xml:

<servlet>
        <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/faces/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

Answer 1

template="./WEB-INF/template.xhtml"

Remove that period.

template="/WEB-INF/template.xhtml"

Otherwise it's looking for /gebruiker/WEB-INF/template.xhtml file. The period as 1st character stands for "start at current folder" while the slash as 1st character stands for "start at root".

---

Unrelated to the concrete problem, you seem to be implementing page-to-page navigation. I strongly recommend to use just GET requests for this, not POST requests. That's more SEO and user friendly.

<h:link value="gebruiker" outcome="gebruiker/index" />

See also:

• When should I use h:outputLink instead of h:commandLink?
• Communication in JSF 2.0 - Implicit navigation