Tomcat Error 404

Thanks, that was just what I was looking for (somehow I overlooked this in the documentation..)

Just as an additional note:
When I set this up, it initially created a circular reference that kept the browser forwarding constantly between two pages:

my "index.jsp" itself does a forwarding to another page (after checking the version of the browser). Now, the funny thing is that the error page defined in Tomcat comes up, but the URL is still the one of the original page that the user typed in. So the forward tries to forward (which uses a relative link) to another page that does not exist, which calls up the error page (index.jsp) again, which forwards to the non-existent page, etc.

So the solution was to create a page called Error404.jsp in the root of every site and use that as the error page. This page would do a forward to "/index.jsp" as an ABSOLUTE link, so that the URL actually gets replaced.

Hii,

Thanks and glad it helps. Good that u explained ur experiences well.
regards
fargo

Hi,

the internet explorer (5.0 and newer I think) will create its own short error message when statuscode 404 is received.
This feature is default on.
To ignore this, i call "response.setStatus(200);" in my error servlet (I use a servlet) to change the statuscode from 404 to 200.


ferdi

Note that the error document is relative to the webapp path...

so if your webapp has a example.com/webapp/404.jsp page, you don't put /webapp/404.jsp into the web.xml instead you just put /404.jsp

I found this out when I did
"telnet localhost 80" and it told me the actual doco it was returning... when I had set up /index2.html as the error doc.

GET /webapp/asdasd HTTP/1.0
 
HTTP/1.1 404 /webapp/index2.html
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:05:04 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.28 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 mod_jk2/2.0.2 mod_ssl/2.8.15 OpenSSL/0.9.7c
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain
 
Connection closed by foreign host.

I created a "Failure.jsp" page and placed it in my webapp directory. I then added the error redirection code displayed below to my /tomcat_home/conf/web.xml file.

    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
        <welcome-file>index.htm</welcome-file>
        <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>

<error-page>
  <error-code>404</error-code>
  <location>/Failure.jsp</location>
</error-page>

</web-app>

When I restart Tomcat and try to access my webapp I get a standard tomcat 404 response, regardless of whether the page I'm trying to access actually exists or not. If remove the <error-page> tags from the web.xml and restart Tomcat everything works fine. What am I missing?  It may be relevant that I'm using the invoker servlet in my configuration. I'm running tomcat in stand alone. Also, I've tried this on both Tomcat 4 and 5 versions with the same result. I also get the same result if I create a simple web.xml file containing the <error-page> tags and place it within my webapps WEB-INF directory. Ideally I would like to redirect all 404 errors to an offsite page as in   <location>http://mysite.com/error.html</location>

Any help is greatly appreciated.

- Rich

atomicfalls, try putting the codes for redirecting 404 into the webapps/MYWEBAPPS/web-info/web.xml file.

speculatrix,

The only web.xml file I have resides in /TOMAT_HOME/conf/web.xml. It is the standard file installed with tomcat and the only modifications I have made to it are the addition of <error-page> tags. I have tried putting a web.xml file containing just the 404 codes in webapps/MYWEBAPPS/WEB-INF/web.xml but the result was the same. When I add the <error-page> tags to either web.xml file all requests to the server return a standard tomcat 404 error response indicating that index.jsp was not found on the server. Removing the <error-page> tags and restarting tomcat solves the problem.