Using SiteMesh with RequestDispatcher's forward()

Posted by Rob Hruska on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Rob Hruska
Published on 2009-03-06T17:28:47Z Indexed on 2010/05/30 21:42 UTC
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I'm attempting to integrate SiteMesh into a legacy application using Tomcat 5 as my a container. I have a main.jsp that I'm decorating with a simple decorator.

In decorators.xml, I've just got one decorator defined:

<decorators defaultdir="/decorators">
  <decorator name="layout-main" page="layout-main.jsp">
    <pattern>/jsp/main.jsp</pattern>
  </decorator>
</decorators>

This decorator works if I manually go to http://example.com/my-webapp/jsp/main.jsp. However, there are a few places where a servlet, instead of doing a redirect to a jsp, does a forward:

getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher("/jsp/main.jsp").forward(request, response);

This means that the URL remains at something like http://example.com/my-webapp/servlet/MyServlet instead of the jsp file and is therefore not being decorated, I presume since it doesn't match the pattern in decorators.xml.

I can't do a <pattern>/*</pattern> because there are other jsps that do not need to be decorated by layout-main.jsp. I can't do a <pattern>/servlet/MyServlet*</pattern> because MyServlet may forward to main.jsp sometimes and perhaps error.jsp at other times.

Is there a way to work around this without expansive changes to how the servlets work? Since it's a legacy app I don't have as much freedom to change things, so I'm hoping for something configuration-wise that will fix this.

SiteMesh's documentation really isn't that great. I've been working mostly off the example application that comes with the distribution. I really like SiteMesh, and am hoping I can get it to work in this case.

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