The 404 Handler

What should the user see when they ask for page that doesn't exist ?
If using Tomcat you can use the web.xml file to specify an error page.

In some projects you may want to have the possibility to define your own Error-Pages (as 404 etc.).
With magnolia it is either possible to define this pages internally in the website tree, or externally.

Since magnolia 3.5 (magnolia internal error page)

If you are using Tomcat/Jboss you can do so by simple edit the magnoliaPublic web.xml (inside webapps\magnoliaPublic\WEB-INF\web.xml)
and add the following section:

<error-page>
     <error-code>404</error-code>
     <location>/errorPages/404.html</location>
  </error-page>

After your application server restarted, the error page will now come out of magnolia (with all it's benefits).

If you have an older version of magnolia or, for whatever reasons, want to have your error page outside of magnolia you can do this as well following the procedure below.

Before magnolia 3.5 (external/redirected error page)

For this example let's assume that your magnolia site is under /index/
and that you have created your own 404.html error page under that..ie

...

Edit the magnoliaPublic web.xml (inside webapps\magnoliaPublic\WEB-INF\web.xml)
and add the following section:

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

Now, create a 404.jsp file inside your \webapps\magnoliaPublic\admintemplates directory
that contains the following jsp code

...

Why must you do it this way?? Well, your web.xml has to point to a file that actually exists somewhere in your webapps directory, not to a 'virtual' file in your Magnolia repository. If you doubt this, try replacing /admintemplates/404.jsp with /magnoliaPublic/index/404.html and see what happens. We point the web.xml to a 'real' file and then have that real file perform a redirect to your magnolia generated 404.html file.

This method tested with 2.1-RC4 and 2.1.3

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When using this with Magnolia 3.5.x

Now to make this work with Magnolia v3.5.x you need to define a bypass for a custom jsp page created above.

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