[opencms-dev] Export Document

[Ben Rometsch]

Hi,

Thanks for the help. It's still quite convoluted IMHO. I'm still unclear
what to do about the broken images, and what the best method is to get a JSP
+ static HTML site exported with a Tomcat+Apache setup. Is there no
documentation for this? 

Ben

-----Original Message-----
From: opencms-dev-admin at opencms.org [mailto:opencms-dev-admin at opencms.org]
On Behalf Of Claus Priisholm
Sent: 10 September 2003 21:06
To: opencms-dev at opencms.org
Cc: cpr at codedroids.dk
Subject: Re: [opencms-dev] Export Document

Having just done the exercise myself this morning, here's my take on it:

The best doc I've found so far is in the opencms.properties file, look for
the "staticexport.enabled" entry. It is "true" per default. I haven't tried
to check if it only applies to the implicit export which happens when you do
a publish or if it also controls the "Static Export" function in the
Administration view, but I wanted things to be exported ASAP so I kept it
set to "true", in which case a regular publish (direct or entire project)
exports html files as well.

Next one is the "staticexport.default.export" which is "true" by default.
For my test case this makes sense as it is basically all static. Which
means, if the individual files in VFS does not have the "export" property
set then it is assumed to be "true", ie. a file that needs to be exported.
The test case did include a two-frame html layout, having a menu along the
top of the page and the contents below. 
All the contents files are HTML pages in the VFS, the frame file and the
menu are both JSPs (though the frame file could probably be a plain HTML as
well...) The JSP files do, by default, get the "export=false" as a property
when created. This of course a reasonable default due to the nature of JSPs
and it does work - publish the project and go to the online project and you
see the HREFs in the html point to the webapp itself or the export
directory, depending on the "export" setting. Works great, but in my case I
knew that once generated the menu is static so I made it "export=true", and
then I added <cms:link> tags where appropriate in order to get the
imagebuttons referenced correctly. 
Publishing/exporting now generates a menu.html in the export directory
- in my case it means that I have the entire test case site as plain good
old HTML files, ready for Apache to serve to the world. I'm not sure if
there can be some problems in terms of dependencies in the sense that the
now 'static' JSP doesn't get regenerated when some files it depends on gets
changed, but so far - doing a static export from the administration menu  -
has not caused any problems, it seems to be regenerated upon the export and
thus is up to date.

Note the "export" property is not limited to "true" or "false" values. 
There is a number of other legal values, among those "dynamic", but not
having fully appreciated what the all the various rulesets in the property
file does, I'm not sure if and when it is a better choice than "false".
Maybe someone on the list can enlighten me...

But a couple of other properties should be set as well. The
"staticexport.path" could be set to the document root of the webserver
(though keep in mind that the user id which is running the app, ie. 
Tomcat in my case) must have write-permission to the directory. Per default
it dumps the exported files into $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/opencms/export. But
this only has to do with where the files are dumped, it does not have any
implications on the URLs in the html files.
This is controlled by "url_prefix_export" - the default value
"/${WEB_APP_NAME}/export" matches the above export directory such that
OpenCms out of the box can make this combined sites, where some pages are
static and others dynamic. For my test case, I simply needed to put the
exported document tree at the document root of Apache, so I set it to
"url_prefix_export=", i.e. empty. But were I to put the exported files in a
sub-directory of the web servers document root then the sub-dir name should
be the value. Note that once set to something other than the default value,
you may not be able to click on the file on the Online project in OpenCms
(well, you can click on it, but you not likely to see the file in the
browser...)

The other prefix settings are more relevant when you're dealing with a more
complex setup, ie. before changing the "url_prefix_http" make sure that
Apache/Tomcat or whatever knows how to resolve the resulting URL, otherwise
you won't be able to log into OpenCms or do anything.

One thing that can be a little confusing when looking at exporting JSPs is
the fact that there is another 'export' directory, the
$CATALINA_HOME/webapps/opencms/WEB-INF/export. This is because JSP files in
VFS is copied to real filesystem in order for Tomcat (or whatever your using
to serve JSP/servlets) to actually handle them. But this is implicit export
is not to be confused with the "static export".

Hope it helps, writing did at least help me clear up a couple of issue
:-)

On onsdag, sep 10, 2003, at 09:32 Europe/Copenhagen, Ben Rometsch wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I cant find any documentation relating to how static export, JSP's and 
> publishing all hang together. Am I missing something?
>
> Ben
>
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--
Claus Priisholm
+45 48 22 46 46, fax: +45 48 22 46 43
cpr at codedroids.com
http://www.codedroids.com

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