Short Version

How to convert:

/Something.jsp

into

/WEB-ROOT/Something.jsp?

What is the Java equivalent of the .NET:

resolveUrl("~/images/DownArrow.png");
//...or...
System.Web.VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/images/DownArrow.png");

Which returns something like:

/WEB-ROOT/Images/DownArrow.png

Long Version

The terminology we're going to use:

Given a relative path, i need the absolute path.

Is issue, of course, is that there are parts of the URL i don't know or control:

  https://contoso.org /WEB-ROOT /images/DownArrow.png
  https://contoso.org /Helpdesk /images/DownArrow.png
  https://contoso.org           /images/DownArrow.png
https://192.168.10.17           /images/DownArrow.png
https://192.168.10.17 /Helpesk  /images/DownArrow.png
https://192.168.10.17 /WEB-ROOT /images/DownArrow.png
\___________________/ \_______/ \___________________/
    host               appname       absolutepath
                      (optional)

All i know is /images/DownArrow.png
and i need it resolved into {appname}/images/DownArrow.png

The Issue

I want to add a link to a .jsp page, e.g.:

<A href="/AccountStatus.jsp">Account status</A>

Except that /AccountStatus.jsp doesn't work, because the .jsp page is not in the "root" of the web-site.

Technically the .jsp files lives in a sub-folder off the "root" on my hard drive called WebRoot:

• 📁WebRoot
  • 📄AccountStatus.jsp

So if i try to update the link:

<A href="/WebRoot/AccountStatus.jsp">Account status</A>

That doesn't work either, because there's actually another different secret folder that HTML content is located in, and it is only knowable at runtime on the hosted application server:

<A href="/WEB-ROOT/AccountStatus.jsp">Account status</A>

Except that name can be modified to something else (i don't know how - but it can):

<A href="/GptThree/AccountStatus.jsp">Account status</A>

How to resolve path to jsp page?

So we now have the question: how to resolve the URL of page so i can give it as a URL to the client.

It .NET it is:

<A href="<%= ResolveUrl("~/AccountStatus.jsp")%>">Account status</A>

Which in Java could be something like:

<A href="<%= resolveUrl("~/AccountStatus.jsp")%>">Account status</A>

Except i need to know where resolveUrl method lives.

Research Effort

• How to get back to root link in jsp
• How could i change the url when forwarding to a page
• Cannot resolve controller URL from JSP
• Absolute url in jsp
• How to resolve URL issue while hosting?: "You should not be hard-coding the domain into your URLs. You should be using server-relative URLs or context-relative URLs (depending upon whether the reference is from the client or server, respectively). That way, the application works no matter where it is deployed."
• What is the difference between ResolveUrl and ResolveClientUrl?
• ASP.NET relative path
• How to use relative paths without including the context root name?
• How to calculate the relative path of JSP
• I wrote a relative path in JSP but it's not working
• Retrieving relative url path of file inside a include file, jsp
• relative and absolute path