Browser can't access/find relative resources like CSS, images and links when calling a Servlet which forwards to a JSP

Question

I\'m having trouble with loading CSS and images and creating links to other pages when I have a servlet forward to a JSP. Specifically, when I set my

Answer 1

All relative URLs in the HTML page generated by the JSP file are relative to the current request URL (the URL as you see in the browser address bar) and not to the location of the JSP file in the server side as you seem to expect. It's namely the webbrowser who has to download those resources individually by URL, not the webserver who has to include them from disk somehow.

Apart from changing the relative URLs to make them relative to the URL of the servlet instead of the location of the JSP file, another way to fix this problem is to make them relative to the domain root (i.e. start with a /). This way you don't need to worry about changing the relative paths once again when you change the URL of the servlet.

    
    


    
    link
    

However, you would probably like not to hardcode the context path. Very reasonable. You can obtain the context path in EL by ${pageContext.request.contextPath}.

    
    


    
    link
    

(which can easily be shortened by and used as ${root} elsewhere)

Or, if you don't fear unreadable XML and broken XML syntax highlighting, use JSTL :

    " />
    


    " />
    ">link
    
">

Either way, this is in turn pretty cumbersome if you have a lot of relative URLs. For that you can use the tag. All relative URL's will instantly become relative to it. It has however to start with the scheme (http://, https://, etc). There's no neat way to obtain the base context path in plain EL, so we need a little help of JSTL here.

<%@taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@taglib prefix="fn" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/functions" %>


${req.requestURL}
...

    
    
    


    
    link
    

This has in turn (again) some caveats. Anchors (the #identifier URL's) will become relative to the base path as well! You would like to make it relative to the request URL (URI) instead. So, change like

jump

to

jump

Each way has its own pros and cons. It's up to you which to choose. At least, you should now understand how this problem is caused and how to solve it :)

See also:

• Is it recommended to use the html tag?