CoreMedia Digital Experience Platform 8 Developer Manual, Version 7.5.45-10
Chapter 9. Appendix | 9.7. Link Format

prependBaseUri

Prepends the "base URI" (web application and mapped servlet, for example /blueprint/servlet) to ALL (annotation based) links. This is required when the CAE web application is served directly by a web container with no prior URL rewriting.

makeAbsoluteUri

Adds a prefix that makes the URI absolute. There are several cases in which URLs must be made absolute:

The prefixes for absolute URLs are specific for each site, therefore they are maintained in each site's settings in a struct named absoluteUrlPrefixes. The prefixes are different for the live and the preview CAE and must be maintained independently. A typical absoluteUrlPrefixes struct looks like this:

Figure 9.8. A basic absoluteUrlPrefixes Struct

	Note
	The URL prefixes must be at least a scheme-relative URL (beginning with "//").

The Blueprint features an application property link.urlPrefixType that determines which absoluteUrlPrefixes entry is effective in a particular application. You will find link.urlPrefixType set appropriately in the application.properties of all components that use the bpbase-links-impl module, e.g. for the cae-live-webapp:

# The live webapp builds live URLs
link.urlPrefixType=live

While the standard Blueprint distinguishes only between preview and live URL prefixes, projects may add additional absoluteUrlPrefixes entries of arbitrary names for special URL prefixes and applications.

Why do we need struct lists after all, if they have only one entry? The above example is valid, but it does not show all configuration options. There are some optional features, and the equivalent complete struct would look like this:

Figure 9.9. A complete absoluteUrlPrefixes Struct

You can declare special URL prefix rules for certain bean types or views, and you can specify an order for ambiguous rules. The default Blueprint does not make use of these options, but they reflect the format of the key field of the old siteMappings entries, so that you do not lose any features when upgrading to this mechanism.

When you start over with a fresh Blueprint and look at the SiteSettings documents of our example content, the configuration looks yet a little different:

Figure 9.10. An initial absoluteUrlPrefixes Struct

We support a variety of deployments for various usecases like local development, production, quickrun, to name just a few. The appropriate URL prefixes in these setups vary from //localhost:40080 to //my.real.public.domain. So there is no reasonable default to be hardcoded in the example content. Therefore we support application properties in the values of urlPrefix and use the well known blueprint.site.mapping.* properties which are declared in the CAEs' application.properties files. Initial content deployment is the only reason why these properties still exist, so you should not bother to maintain them for new sites in production repositories, but maintain the URL prefixes only in the content.