[Rob Silver]

MyEclipse4Spring – Understanding the control flow the Webinar Project, TheOffice which exemplifies Spring framework Scaffolding projects in MyEclipse for Spring.
I used Spring MVC as the GUI

I have a real problem with not being able to determine the control flow of the project
Clearly it uses the Filter listed in the web.xml file for SiteMesh but how exactly does it get called up? I mean what happens 1st after the application server say Tomcat loads in
the web.xml file ? What object is loaded first and how does it serve up / call up main.jsp
and the resulting pages/menu.jsp page that first appears. This is not so straight forward and I would really like more clarification of this process if possible.
What class loads first how ultimately the menu.jsp file is rendered

[cconway]

The filter in web.xml causes sitemesh to kick into action. Then sitemesh uses the decorators.xml file where it finds this:

<decorator name="main" page="main.jsp">
        <pattern>/*</pattern>
</decorator>

That decorator causes every request to load main.jsp. If you open main.jsp, you’ll see logic that includes the dashboard or <decorator:body /> based on the servlet path of the request:

As far as how the sitemesh filter classes use the this configuration and which sitemesh objects load, you would need to dig into the specifics of sitemesh.

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