Details
-
Improvement
-
Status: Closed
-
Minor
-
Resolution: Fixed
-
Trunk
Description
Currently when we define a request-redirect in controllers it underneath uses the Java default 302 redirections (temporary redirect).
Actually all redirect response types (url, cross-redirect, request-redirect, request-redirect-noparam) call HttpServletResponse.sendRedirect() through RequestHandler.callRedirect(). So all controllers redirections do temporary redirects (302). Ths is all good as long as you don't worry about SEO best practices which recommend to use 301 instead of 302 (Google for "301 vs 302" or see [1], [2], [3]).
This matters only for eCommerce. In the context of an ERP (or backend by and large), we want to replace 302 by 303 and keep the possibility to use 302 (for Post/Redirect/Get pattern where 303 is best on HTTP 1.1, 302 on HTTP 1.0)
I want to set a default 303 status-code property in requestHandler.properties file. Which could be changed for 302 for those who prefer it. The idea is then to allow to override this default value with a status-code attribute on the response element. But since I want also to be able to override a complete controller (like for an eCommerce controller) without having to override each concerned requests. I finally decided to use also a status-code element in site-conf.xsd to be placed before handlers:
<xs:element name="status-code" type="xs:string"/>
If present, this will override the status-code property. And the status-code attribute on the response element will override both (cascading), eg:
<response name="success" type="request-redirect" value="main" status-code="301"/>
[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
[2] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40132
[3] http://searchengineland.com/images/301-302-explained.gif