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I've been experimenting with writing webapps in Clojure, and it's been pretty easy until now. I followed Chas Emerick's excellent screencast starting clojure and got an url shortener up and running pretty quickly. Next I wanted to be able to deploy it, and that's when the trouble started.

When I run it in development or deploy it to Jetty as the root webapp, everything is fine, but when I deploy it with a context path, it doesn't. Or, rather, it almost works. All my Compojure routes still work, but FORM action links in HTML files are broken and give me 404's.

This is the Compojure route setup:

  (defroutes app*
    (rt/resources "/")
    (GET "/" request (homepage request))
    (POST "/shorten" request
          (let [id (shorten (-> request :params :url))]
            (response/redirect "/")))
    (GET "/:id" [id] (redirect id)))

  (def app (compojure.handler/site app*))

And here is the HTML for the homepage template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Insert title here</title>
    <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="site.css" />
</head>
<body>
    <form method="POST" action="shorten">
        <input type="text" name="url" />
        <input type="submit" value="Shorten!" />
    </form>
</body>
</html>

The problem is the action="shorten"URL. When deployed to Jetty with a context path of /example everything work fine, until I trigger the form submit. Then Jetty complains that it can't find localhost:8080/shorten which means (I think) that it's not being treated as a relative path, but an absolute one.

So, my question is: how to fix this? I guess I could just specify the full path in the action link, but that would be inflexible and make it harder to run the servlet in development. Is there a way to configure my way out of this? Or some magic URL prefix (like ~/ in Razor) that will just do the right thing?

corvuscorax
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  • Are you accessing that form from /example? Since it's a relative path in your action, your browser ought to be prepending it with your current URI. Maybe load up Firebug or some HTTP inspector and see if you're getting a redirect. – mqsoh Jun 10 '12 at 08:04
  • Yes, I'm accessing it from /example ... and the css file in the is being served correctly (via a 304 redirect) - but the
    action is not.
     – corvuscorax Jun 10 '12 at 08:26
  • When you click submit, do you see any redirects for page requests? ...like a 301 from /example/shorten to /shorten? – mqsoh Jun 10 '12 at 22:31
  • No, triggering the FORM action does not cause a redirect - just a plain GET to /shorten – corvuscorax Jun 11 '12 at 08:07
  • It's the trailing slash. If you go to /example/ then the form will post to /example/shorten. Without the trailing slash, the browser views 'example' as a file at / and the form as wanting 'shorten' instead of 'example'. I don't know how to fix it in your situation, though. In my previous experience I've set redirects for trailing slashes and, in fact, when serving a request for a literal directory Apache will send those redirects by default. – mqsoh Jun 11 '12 at 14:15

1 Answers1

1

i had the same problem. Change the line:

(POST "/shorten" request

to

(POST "shorten" request

and it should work (well, it did for me)

yazz.com
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