Configure access to static documents on HTTP server

While customizing WebSphere Commerce stores, if you need to provide links to static content deployed on your web server, lets' say for example you need to have a link for size guidelines as shown below:

http://<hostname>/infodocs/size_guidelines.html

To access this file from Commerce, you will need to use a link which might look as follows:

http://<hostname>/info/size_guidelines

You will need to make the following changes to httpd.conf:

• For VirtualHost 80 and 443. add the following entry

Alias   /infodocs     "/opt/webserver/assets/infodocs"

• For rewrite rules, add the following line:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/info.*$ 

Where infodocs is a folder you need to create your HTTP server (or any other you see appropriate).


General considerations:

• The URL used to access the html file from HTTP server directly can't be identical to the one used by Commerce and that is why I used two different links /infodocs and /info
• For Commerce SEO to work properly you can't use a file extension and that is why I removed .html from the URL 
• The Commerce needs to be customized to properly display the content of a static html file. For example, let's assume your SEO will use view CustomStatiContent to handle /info/ and let's assume this view will be rendered using CustomStaticContent.jsp, in such case, this jsp should have some logic that looks as below:

<c:catch var="e">
<c:import var="pageContents" url="${filePath}" charEncoding="UTF-8"/>
</c:catch>
<c:if test="${!empty pageContents && empty e }">
<c:out value="${pageContents}" escapeXml="false"/>
</c:if>

Where filePath variable will hold the following URL (given our example above) http://<hostname>/infodocs/size_guidelines.html