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ShortURLs

Version 8.1 by Sergiu Dumitriu on 2008/02/02
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Short XWiki URLs

This tutorial shows how to tune your XWiki platform by replacing the default URL scheme with a shorter scheme.

Information

A short URL is an URL without the xwiki/bin/view parts.

Application name

The /xwiki/ part is the application name. It identifies the application that should process the request, and it allows a container to host more than one application. You can change this part to any other name, by renaming the xwiki directory and changing the dispay-name parameter in web.xml. A special case is when deploying XWiki as the ROOT application, which actually allows the application name part to be empty, so an URL can take the form server.com/bin/view/Space/Document.

If you deploy XWiki as the ROOT app, don't forget to also change in WEB-INF/web.xml the display-name parameter to the empty string, like:

<display-name></display-name>
Information

Starting with XWiki Platform 1.3M2, you don't have to change the display-name parameter anymore.

Struts action name

The third part, /view/, identifies the struts action that should process a request. So this tells what do we want to do with the document, /view/ it, /edit/ it or /delete/ it, for example. The XWiki platform allows this part to be missing, considering that the default action is to just display the document, so an URL like server.com/bin/Space/Document will work out of the box.

Even more, the URL factory, the component that generates URLs, can be configured to skip this part when the action is /view/. To do this, in xwiki.cfg write:

xwiki.showviewaction=0

Servlet mapping name

The second part is the hardest part to remove. It identifies the servlet that should process the page, which, for /bin/, is the Struts servlet. To get rid of /bin/, for the moment web.xml must be changed in a  container-dependent way, so that the container's default servlet is configured to serve the existing directories, like skins, yui, tinymce and wikieditor. In Jetty, the container shipped with the XWiki installer, you will have to write something like:

<servlet>
   <servlet-name>defaultSkins</servlet-name>
   <servlet-class>org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.Default</servlet-class>
   <init-param>
     <param-name>relativeResourceBase</param-name>
     <param-value>skins</param-value>
   </init-param>
   <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
 </servlet>
 <servlet-mapping>
   <servlet-name>defaultSkins</servlet-name>
   <url-pattern>/skins/*</url-pattern>
 </servlet-mapping>

In Tomcat, the default servlet does not accept a parameter for changing the resource base, so you will need to write another default servlet.

The second thing to do, is to copy the mapping for the Struts servlet to also be activated for /, like:

<servlet-mapping>
   <servlet-name>action</servlet-name>
   <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
 </servlet-mapping>

Be sure to leave the other mappings in place, so that /bin/ works, too.

And the last thing that must be changed is the default mapping used by the URL factory, by adding in xwiki.cfg:

xwiki.defaultactionpath=

Conclusion

After performing all these changes, you should be able to access documents with URLs like:

  • server.com/Space/Document
  • server.com/Space/ (pointing to Space.WebHome)
  • server.com/Document (pointing to Main.Document)
  • server.com/ will show Main.WebHome, without any redirect.

As a bonus, these changes are backwards compatible, meaning that any currently working URL will also work with these changes performed, so you won't have any broken bookmarks.

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