PrettyFaces 404 page without URL redirect - jsf

Question

In our app with PrettyFaces 2.0.12.Final, we have our redirects set up in pretty-config.xml.
<url-mapping id="foo">
<pattern value="/foo/#{alias}" />
<view-id value="/foo.xhtml" />
</url-mapping>
We have a custom 404 page set up in our web.xml.
<error-page>
<error-code>404</error-code>
<location>/404.xhtml</location>
</error-page>
When a user receives a 404 Not Found error, for a foo "alias" that doesn't exist, they're redirected to "/404.xhtml", and the browser URL bar does not retain the offending address.
Is there a way maintain the URL of "/foo/aliasdoesnotexist" in the browser URL bar and still display the 404 page?

Answer 1

One way to handle this scenario is to handle the Exception in your application and perform an internal forward to the error page:
You can set up a PrettyFaces mapping for the 404 page:
<url-mapping id="foo">
<pattern value="/foo/#{alias}" />
<view-id value="/foo.xhtml" />
</url-mapping>
Then in your application code:
catch ( Exception e )
{
String contextName = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getContextName();
FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().dispatch(contextName + "/404");
}
If you want to catch the exception globally, you'll need to create a servlet filter to do this. See the following topic for how to create a filter that catches all exceptions:
how do I catch errors globally, log them and show user an error page in J2EE app
Hope this helps!
~Lincoln