How to create user-friendly and seo-friendly urls in jsf?

Question

For example, I have class Article with methods getTitle () and getContent ().

I also have ArticlesService with method getAllArticles (). How to create a list of links with meaningful names (formed with #{article.title})? Like:

http://mysiteaddress.com/article/first-article-title
http://mysiteaddress.com/article/how-to-make-links-in-jsf

..or something similar.

I can create links with all necessary functionality with <h:commandLink>, but I don't know how to make nice 'href' for it: it always has href '#'.

I can create nice links with <h:outputLink> but I don't know how to add necessary functionality to it.

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In jsp I created my own front-controller, which parsed urls from requests and then performed redirection to correspondent jsp-page.

How to achieve the same functionality in JSF?

Answer 1

If this is intended as an improvement of an existing application, then you basically need a Filter which detects "dirty" and "friendly" URLs. When it detects a "dirty" URL, then it should redirect the request to a "friendly" URL by HttpServletResponse#sendRedirect(). When it detects a "friendly" URL, then it should forward the request to the "dirty" URL by RequestDispatcher#forward(). An example can be found in this related question: How to use a servlet filter in Java to change an incoming servlet request url?

Further, you also need a custom ViewHandler to produce the desired "friendly" URL for JSF <h:form>, <h:link>, etc. An example can be found here: Dynamic Directory in Java EE Web Application.

If this is a new application or an application which is open to changes, you could consider any of the existing pretty URL libraries instead of reinventing the wheel:

• PrettyFaces, which is a complete URL rewrite solution. It requires an additional XML configuration file pretty-config.xml. This library is useful if you want to completely change URLs and/or want to configure redirects from old to new URLs.
• FacesViews of OmniFaces library, which makes existing URLs just extensionless by a single web.xml context param. It also supports "MultiViews" whereby path parameters can declaratively be injected in managed beans. E.g. /foo/bar/baz can point to /foo.xhtml and the values bar and baz can be injected by @Param(pathIndex).

There's also the experimental PrettyUrlPhaseListener of Mojarra Scales library, but it's an old library and PrettyFaces is largely based on it, so it's not worth the effort.