How to reference a .css file from a view (.jsp) in Spring MVC?

Question

This is the structure: (they're in the same directory!)

Directory
|-view.jsp
|-stylesheet.css

When I do <link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen"> The .css file does not get referenced correctly, i.e. I have no idea what path to set to get to it (if put as a URL in the browser, I get a 404).

I guess it gets translated as http://localhost:8080/myApp/stylesheet.css and then there is no mapping defined for it. Logging says:

WARN : org.springframework.web.servlet.PageNotFound - No mapping found for HTTP request with URI [/myApp/stylesheet.css] in DispatcherServlet with name 'appServlet'

It should work like this, shouldn't it? For example, this works:

<%@ include file="include.jsp"%>

include.jsp is in the same folder as well.

kryger · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-30 08:11:41Z

3

JSP views and other resources stored under WEB-INF/ are not directly accessible to the end-user, they are web application's private resources and the server doesn't expose them. You'll have to place any public resources one level above WEB-INF/, for example:

webapp/
|-- style/
|     stylesheet.css
|-- images/
|     image1.png
|     image2.png
|-- html/
|     index.html
+- WEB-INF/
  +-- jsp/
        view.jsp
        include.jsp

edited Aug 30, 2018 at 8:11

answered May 11, 2013 at 19:57

kryger

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4 Comments

Bloke Over a year ago

So how does a JSP (not an end-user) access a resource (a CSS), specifically, what path should webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/view.jsp set as href to reference this webapp/style/stylesheet.css?

Max Vasileuski Over a year ago

@Bloke JSP does not access the CSS, the user's browser does it. And browser can't find resource under WEB-INF

kryger Over a year ago

The JSP template gets rendered to plain HTML and exposed under some publicly accessible URL; you can either use an absolute path to the CSS (i.e. "/myApp/style/stylesheet.css") or a relative path (depends on what URL the page is mapped to; if it's in the webapp's root, like /myApp/index.html, it would be "style/stylesheet.css", if it's on a different level, for example /myApp/subdir/page.html, it would be "../style/stylesheet.css")

jdev Over a year ago

how you put <a href="view.jsp"></a> in index.html.if want to navigate to view.jsp in web-inf folder?

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