Integrating CKFinder

This website contains links to software which is either no longer maintained or will be supported only until the end of 2019 (CKFinder 2). For the latest documentation about current CKSource projects, including software like CKEditor 4/CKEditor 5, CKFinder 3, Cloud Services, Letters, Accessibility Checker, please visit the new documentation website.

If you look for an information about very old versions of CKEditor, FCKeditor and CKFinder check also the CKEditor forum, which was closed in 2015. If not, please head to StackOverflow for support.

This article describes various ways of integrating CKFinder for Java with your page.

Integrating CKFinder with your Application

After you download the CKFinder for Java .war file, follow the steps below to integrate it with your application:

  • Unpack CKFinder for Java.
  • Copy the ckfinder folder to your application.
  • Copy the CKFinder config.xml file from its WEB-INF folder into the WEB-INF folder of your application.
  • Copy the contents of the CKFinder WEB-INF/lib folder into the WEB-INF/lib folder of your application.
  • Copy the ConnectorServlet settings from the CKFinder web.xml file to the web.xml file of your application.
<servlet>
	<servlet-name>ConnectorServlet</servlet-name>
	<servlet-class>com.ckfinder.connector.ConnectorServlet</servlet-class>
	<init-param>
		<param-name>XMLConfig</param-name>
		<param-value>/WEB-INF/config.xml</param-value>
	</init-param>
	<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>ConnectorServlet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>
		/ckfinder/core/connector/java/connector.java
	</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
  • Just like in the sample application, by default CKFinder is disabled due to security reasons. To turn it on, change the <enabled> element value in the config.xml file to true. Note that it is recommended to use a more fine-grained authentication method by overriding the checkAuthentication method.
<enabled>true</enabled>
  • Similarily, some further adjustments of the config.xml file might be needed, like baseUrl and baseDir paths, for example.

File Upload Filter

As described in the Flash Upload Problem section of the Troubleshooting article, if you are using the Flash multiple file upload component together with session-based authentication, you might get some "missing cookies" problems when trying to upload files. To work around this Flash bug you have to take care of posting cookies yourself. On server side this is done by setting a FileUploadFilter:

<filter>
	<filter-name>FileUploadFilter</filter-name>
	<filter-class>com.ckfinder.connector.FileUploadFilter</filter-class>
        <init-param>
              <param-name>sessionCookieName</param-name>
              <param-value>JSESSIONID</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <init-param>
              <param-name>sessionParameterName</param-name>
              <param-value>jsessionid</param-value>
        </init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
	<filter-name>FileUploadFilter</filter-name>
	<url-pattern>/ckfinder/core/connector/java/connector.java</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

Besides basic elements like name, full class declaration (<filter-class>), and a mapping applying the filter to a specific URL (it has to be the same mapping as for ConnectorServlet), there are also two optional configuration parameters which help to identify "authentication cookies" that need to be rewritten.

Those parameters are the name of the session cookie (sessionCookieName), which in Java defaults to the JSESSIONID value, and the name of the session path parameter (sessionParameterName), which in Java defaults to jsessionid. These parameters are optional and can be omitted. However, if you are using custom configuration and you have changed names for these session identifiers on your server, you should also specify them in the FileUploadFilter init parameters so that CKFinder would know what to rewrite.

Installing CKFinder as a JSP Page Tag

In order to install CKFinder as a tag inside a .jsp page, follow the steps outlined below:

  • Install CKFinder as described in the section above.
  • In order to use the tag on the JSP page you should import the tag library by using the following directive:
<%@ taglib uri="http://cksource.com/ckfinder" prefix="ckfinder" %>

You can now use the CKFinder tag on your JSP page in the following way:

<ckfinder:ckfinder basePath="/CKFinderJava/ckfinder/" />

The only required attribute is the basePath that specifies the path to the CKFinder folder. Numerous optional attributes are also available and can be used to customize CKFinder to your needs, like in the example below:

<ckfinder:ckfinder basePath="/CKFinderJava/ckfinder/" width="700" height="500" />

This code creates a CKFinder instance with a width of 700 pixels and height of 500 pixels.

Extending Configuration

To read more about extending your CKFinder configuration, refer to the Extending CKFinder Configuration article.

Integration methods