I came across a very weird problem today. I had two cocoon applications that were once running in different JVM instances, both mapped to / and I moved them into a single Jetty instance mapped on /A and /B (for simplicity).
Then I modified the ProxyPass settings and used the jetty web.xml trick to change the cookie path.
What's this "web.xml trick"?
Now, the interesting thing was that while /A performed just like before, /B had a wierd problem: "redirects" were absolute to the "webapp server", not to the "web server".
Both apps had the same exact version of cocoon (compiled this morning).
After careful examination and extensive protocol dump, I was able to understand that while /A used
cocoon.redirectTo(../../index);
/B used
cocoon.redirectTo(/index);
and both turn up to the in the same position, but while the first actually works (the redirect is "remapped" to the original Proxy URL, not to the appserver one which is obviously firewalled), the second doesn't do remapping and the web application fails because it tries to connect to the webapp directly
[actually it's even worse, because it tries to connect to the ProxyPass setting, which are http://localhost:8000/ in my case, so it tries to connect to *your* machine!]
The interesting thing is that this worked perfectly in the past, when both were mapped to /, but I can't tell what broke since I moved them *and* change the version of cocoon at the same time.
Did anybody experience a similar behavior?
The explanation is in the servlet spec for HttpServletResponse.sendRedirect: "If the location is relative with a leading '/' the container interprets it as relative to the servlet container root."
Absolute paths don't redirect to the _webapp_ root, but the _servlet container_ root. This means that redirectTo("/index") produces a "http://localhost:8000/index"; and not a "http://localhost:8000/B/index";.
Since the redirect location doesn't start with the ProxyPassReverse URL prefix, the httpd server sends that location verbatim to the browser.
Et voil�: redirecting to the webapp root cannot be done with an absolute path.
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects } Orixo, the opensource XML business alliance - http://www.orixo.com
