Any clever ways of handling the context in a web app?

Question

In Java, web apps are bundled in to WARs. By default, many servlet containers will use the WAR name as the context name for the application.

Thus myapp.war gets depl

Answer 1

You can use request.getContextPath() to build absolute URLs that aren't hard-coded to a specific context. As an earlier answer indicated, for JavaScript you just set a variable at the top of your JSP (or preferably in a template) and prefix that as the context.

That doesn't work for CSS image replacement unless you want to dynamically generate a CSS file, which can cause other issues. But since you know where your CSS file is in relation to your images, you can get away with relative URLs.

For some reason, I've had trouble with IE handling relative URLs and had to fall back to using expressions with a JavaScript variable set to the context. I just split my IE image replacements off into their own file and used IE macros to pull in the correct ones. It wasn't a big deal because I already had to do that to deal with transparent PNGs anyway. It's not pretty, but it works.