Rewrite and control URLs with SAP Approuter

[quovadis]

Hello Community,

Recently, I have been playing around with different deployment options of HTML5 applications crafted with SAP Appgyver;

As a reminder a webapp crafted with SAP Appygyver can be downloaded as a static zip file to be deployed literally to anywhere.

The deployment options I have put to a test were;

• SAP Appgyver hosting (default, built-in)
• SAP BTP hosting with a standalone approuter
• Google Firebase hosting

The SAP Appgyver build service native hosting is the most straightforward method of having your webapp up and running on the public internet (free of charge). But the build service configuration offers very little control on how your webapp is branded and eventually deployed.

The other hosting alternatives, namely SAP BPT and Google Firebase offer way more control and flexibility on how the web applications are deployed.

Let me explain the main issue I have encountered so far.

It happens to be that SAP Appgyver crafted webapps have the .html extension appended with all the web pages files.

Interestingly, Google Firebase offers an easy way to control the .html extensions of the web pages being served, namely:

https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/full-config?authuser=0&hl=en#control_html_extensions

The cleanUrls attribute set to true hints the hosting service to remove the .html extension from the Urls being served thus preventing 404 errors from happening or the need to rewrite the Urls yielding the not found page error (as these pages do exist).

Still I cannot find the equivalent setting on SAP BTP. With SAP BTP and SAP Appgyver HTML5 static webapp hosted on SAP BTP repo service it appears to be the .html extension of a child webpage is ALWAYS being automatically removed thus resulting in 404 or File not found errors if trying to refresh such a page. If I add manually .html to the child web page URL in the browser that fixes the File not Found 404 error.

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I am pretty sure the approuter's configuration that allows for URLs rewrite (xs-app.json) can also allow for the control of the .html extension (to not strip it); I just cannot not find the info. Any ideas ? kind regards; Piotr

PS.

1. I have also posted a comment to an excellent blog by nicolai.geburek here.