Mats Lindh

I’ve been trying to find a solution to this issue for a couple of hours: We have several struts actions in our Java-based webapp, all neatly mapped through different .do action handlers. I wanted to switch our handling of the root / index URL (http://www.example.com/) from being a static redirect to the actual action to instead present the content right there, without the useless redirect. This apparently proved to be harder than I thought; after searching a lot through Google, reading through mailing lists and the official documentation, it seems that there is no way to specify an action to handle these requests by default in struts. There may be one, but I could not for the life of ${deity} find it.

As simply doing it in Struts were out of the question, I turned to an old friend of mine, the ever so helpful mod_rewrite. mod_rewrite is capable of rewriting URLs internally in Apache before they get handled at other levels. The problem was that mod_jk seemed to grab the request before the replacements were made, but a few resources pointed me in the correct direction:

• Remember to put mod_rewrite after mod_jk
• Use RewriteLog and RewriteLogLevel to debug

After a bit of debugging with the rewritelog, everything came together. This is how it ended up:

       	RewriteEngine On
       	RewriteLog /tmp/rewrite.log
       	RewriteLogLevel 3
       	RewriteRule ^/?$ /destinationfile [PT,NE]

The RewriteLog say that we should log the rewrite progress to /tmp/rewrite.log, and RewriteLogLevel say that we should log at the most detailed format. Use 0, 1, 2 for less debugging information. Remember to comment out these lines when things work. DO NOT use the RewriteLog when not actually debugging the rewrites.

Came across an issue with searching for UTF-8 characters in Solr today; the search worked just as it should (probably since we’re using a phonetic field to search), but our facets and limitations didn’t work as they should. This happened as soon as we had a value with an UTF-8 character (> 127 in ascii value), in our case the norwegian letters Æ, Ø or Å.

The solution was presented by Charlie Jackson at the Solr-user mailing list and is quite simply to add URIEncoding="UTF-8" to the appropriate connector in the Tomcat server.xml file. This is also documented on the Solr on Tomcat page in the Solr Wiki .