How to route a request to a static html file in DXA Java 1.5

Question

I have a DXA Java 1.5 development environment with Web 8.1.1. In this environment I need to merge DXA with an existing Static Website. If my existing pages have a jsp extension when I request those directly the response returns with the page as I was hoping. If I request a page that has an html or htm extension DXA tries to get the page from the broker. I thought that if I created a filter then mapped it in the web.xml this would forward the request appropriately to the Static htm or html on the filesystem but, I end up with the same DXA Error Page as I did without the Filter that states:

"The page you were looking for cannot be found. This page may have been moved. We apologize for any inconvenience. "

I have 2 folders in the Static Website that contain htm and html files and I need to be able to have these files served as is. What can I do to enable this to happen?

Answer 1

SDL DXA, out of the box, has a PageController with the following Request Mapping

@RequestMapping(value = "/**", produces = {MediaType.TEXT_HTML_VALUE, MediaType.ALL_VALUE})

This is handling ALL request, regardless of extension

This could be updated to look like

@RequestMapping(value = { "/**/*.jsp", "/**/*.html", "/**/*.txt", "/**/*.xml" }, method = { GET })

However, you will also need to modify your web.xml, which tells Spring MVC which urls to dispatch to the dispatcher (usually further defined in dispatcher-servlet.xml), for example mine reads as below. It is telling Spring MVC to handle all of these requests

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/navigation/*</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>/system/*</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.txt</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.dcp</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.png</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.gif</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.jpeg</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.pdf</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.vcf</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.swf</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.zip</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.xls</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.xlsx</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

I also have, as I want to ignore some JSPs, this to tell String MVC NOT to handle JSPs in /WEB-INF/views/

<servlet-mapping>
   <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
   <url-pattern>/WEB-INF/views/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

I think in your situation just removing <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern> would be enough to allow all HTML files to "pass through" and be resolved from the file-system.

Update following @Troy's comment

To exclude 2 folders of HTML files I'd try the following

Create web.xml file in your project - mine looks like this https://gist.github.com/chrismrgn/fdc1ec017664aeca0ef1ab70f72cc895

Then replace:

<servlet-mapping>
   <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
   <url-pattern>/WEB-INF/views/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

With:

<servlet-mapping>
   <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
   <url-pattern>/html-folder-1/*</url-pattern>
   <url-pattern>/html-folder-2/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Hope that helps?

Answer 2

I have seen a similar implementation in .NET using HTTPModules (extending System.Web.IHttpModule). We just load this before DXA StaticContent Module (Sdl.Web.Mvc.Statics.StaticContentModule - in DXA 1.2 we could not extend this) so we fall back to the broker if the request cannot be served by an item in the filesystem