PrettyFaces, Filter, and url-pattern issue - jsf-2

Question

I'm working on a Java EE (which I'm fairly new to) web application (JSF, JPA, EJB), and am in the process of incorporating PrettyFaces for human readable/bookmarkable URLs. I've been using a Filter for 2 reasons.
to make sure a user is logged in.
to wrap the call to filterChain.doFilter(...) in a transaction so JPA lazy loading works when generating views (for example, I can just set a Department object in the backing bean, and use #{backingBean.department.employees} to get the associated list of employees in the .xhmtl file).
Before incorporating PrettyFaces, I was using a url-pattern (in web.xml) of *.xhmtl (although the filter doesn't really need to run for the login page) for the Filter. With PrettyFaces, trying to specify a url-pattern for Filters seems to be a bit of a problem, mainly due to the lack of flexibility of the url-pattern rules (lack of support for regular expressions). Is there another way of accomplishing what I need with-out using Filters (and without having to duplicate code)?
Also, I know I can add a static portion to the beginning of the URL (like, /dept/#{deptName}/... and then use a Filter with a url-pattern of /dept/*, but I was hoping to just start with something like /#{deptName}/... (and using a url-pattern of /* runs the filter on everything, including images, javascript, css, etc.)
Basically, the filter has a transaction injected...
#Resource UserTransaction tx;
And does something like this.
public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response,
FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
HttpServletRequest httpReq = (HttpServletRequest) request;
HttpServletResponse httpRes = (HttpServletResponse) response;
HttpSession session = httpReq.getSession();
User currentUser = (User)session.getAttribute("userInSession");
if (currentUser == null) {
httpRes.sendRedirect("...") //redirect to LoginServlet
} else {
try {
tx.begin();
chain.doFilter(httpReq, httpRes);
}
catch (Exception e) { }
finally {
try {
tx.commit();
}
catch (Exception e) { }
}
}
I have a managed bean that is like this...
#ManagedBean
#RequestScoped
#URLMapping(
id="uutSerialNumber",
pattern="/#{uutSerialNumberController.programId}/uut/#{uutSerialNumberController.uutId}",
viewId="/uutSerialNumber.xhtml"
)
public class UutSerialNumberController {
#EJB private ProgramServiceBean programServiceBean;
#EJB private UutServiceBean uutServiceBean;
private Integer programId;
private Integer uutId;
private Program program;
private Uut uut;
#URLAction
public String loadData() {
program = programServiceBean.findByProgramId(programId);
uut = uutServiceBean.findUutByUutId(uutId);
return null;
}
//other stuff, setters/getters
}
In the view uutSerialNumber.xhmtl, I do something like this (which requires lazy-loading, unless I want to go to the trouble of manually pre-fetching collections in my uutServiceBean.findUutByUutId())...
<ul>
<c:forEach var="serialNumber item="#{uut.serialNumbers}>
<li>#{serialNumber.description}</li>
</c:forEach>
</ul>

Answer 1

Turns out I didn't have PrettyFaces configured correctly (doh!). It was a little confusing because in the PrettyFaces Reference Guide, it says that you don't need to edit web.xml if using Servlet 3.0 (which I am). But, doing the following solved my problem.
<!-- PrettyFaces Filter -->
<filter>
<filter-name>Pretty Filter</filter-name>
<filter-class>com.ocpsoft.pretty.PrettyFilter</filter-class>
</filter>
<!-- My own view Filter -->
<filter>
<filter-name>View Filter</filter-name>
<filter-class>com.jasoni.ViewFilter</filter-class>
</filter>
<!-- mappings -->
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>Pretty Filter</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
<dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher>
<dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
<dispatcher>ERROR</dispatcher>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>View Filter</filter-name>
<url-pattern>*.xhtml</url-pattern>
<dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher>
<dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
<dispatcher>ERROR</dispatcher>
</filter-mapping>
With this, I'm able to run a filter on my views and use a Transaction View Pattern (similar to the one mentioned in Pro JPA 2, except using a Filter instead of a Serlvet, so lazy loading works with JPA), and also check that the user has a session going.

Answer 2

I cant see how using PrettyFaces may affect your filter - you can always get PrettyContext from HttpServletRequest and get all you need for processing url's, including regular expressions. As for JPA and lazy loading - this is quite a different story, I'd suggest to be more specific in this area and provide more details, code snippets, etc for us to be able to help.