Best Practice for Edits to JSP files

Your JSP files are located in the 'WebContent' (or 'www') directory under your geoportal project folder (Project Explorer). Expand the WebContent folder and then the 'catalog' folder to view the folders that contain JSP files. These folders are organized by functional areas to make it easier to locate a page that you may want to edit.

For example, expand the 'main' folder to see the files for the home page:

• home.jsp
• home.page
• homeBody.jsp

When you want to edit the contents of the geoportal home page, you could approach this by editing the homeBody.jsp page since it contains all the home page content markup. However, a better practice is to create a copy of homePage.jsp (e.g. homePageCustom.jsp) that you will use for making and recording custom edits to your geoportal home page.

To make your custom home page edits get reflected in the Geoportal web application, you will also need to open the home.jsp page and change the line that directs the name=body tile to the jsp page for the home page content to point to your new custom home page jsp. For example:

<tiles:put name="body" value="/catalog/main/homeBodyCustom.jsp"/>

Benefits of this approach

• Better Upgradability - By separating your custom edits from the default distribution JSP page, then when you upgrade to a new release, your edits do not get overwritten during the upgrade and can be easily integrated in a new release deployment
• Default Recovery Plan - If you make a change to the custom JSP page that breaks your geoportal, you can easily reconfigure the geoportal to use the default JSP page from the original distribution

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