I just started with Spring 3 MVC today. Running into a dilemma...
web.xml maps everything ("/") to Spring. But as a result, when I put something like:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<%=request.getContextPath()%>/css/navigation.css" />
It is not returned by the container...
Perhaps someone could suggest how to handle this?
Thanks.
Use mvc:resources, as explained in the documentation. This allows service static resources from the web app, but also from the classpath.
How are you trying to serve it? If you are trying to serve it from the webapp itself (ie WEB-INF/static/css) You would need to include a servlet to do that for you. In the spring context you can include something like
<mvc:resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/" />
You can see more here
As suggested by others, use mvc:resource to serve your static resources.
<mvc:resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/" />
It is also recommended to avoid using scriptlets in your JSP code if possible. You should instead use JSTL to build the correct path to your CSS file.
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c"%>
...
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<c:url value="/resources/css/navigation.css" />"/>
