Alternate Docroots and Local Resource Paths

Alternate Docroots and Local Resource Paths

Judging from the traffic on the various GlassFish mailing lists and user forums, it seems that support for alternate docroots in GlassFish has become very popular.

However, from the feedback given, it looks like the way alternate docroot paths are computed by the web container deserves additional coverage: Several developers have tried leveraging alternate docroots and were left wondering why the container would return a 404 response instead of the contents of the requested resource.

Hopefully, this blog will clarify things.

When configuring an alternate docroot, try keeping in mind the following rules:

• Alternate docroots (more specifically, their "from" values) are matched against a request's path info (obtained by calling javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest.getPathInfo()).
• The local path of a resource whose request has been matched by an alternate docroot is computed by appending the request's path info to the alternate docroot's "dir" value.

As an example, consider the following alternate docroot declaration in sun-web.xml:

  <property name="alternatedocroot_1" value="from=/orderstore/* dir=C:/stryker_cci/orderstore"/>

and this request URL:

  http://localhost:8080/CIWeb/orderstore/test.txt

Assume the request is mapped to a web application deployed at /CIWeb, meaning the request URL's context root component is given as /CIWeb, and its path info component is given as /orderstore/test.txt, which is matched by the above alternate docroot. The local filesystem path where the requested resource will be looked up is given as the value of the alternate docroot's "dir" value:

  C:/stryker_cci/orderstore

with the request's path info:

  /orderstore/test.txt

appended to it, resulting in:

  C:/stryker_cci/orderstore/orderstore/test.txt

As another example, consider the following alternate docroot declaration in sun-web.xml:

  <property name="alternatedocroot_1" value="from=/myimages/* dir=/images"/>

and this request URL:

  http://localhost:8080/myimages/image1.jpg

Further assume that the above request is mapped to a web application deployed at the root context ("/"). In this case, the request's path info evaluates to:

 /myimages/image1.jpg

meaning it is matched by the above alternate docroot. The local filesystem path where the requested resource will be looked up is given as the value of the alternate docroot's "dir" value:

  /images

with the request's path info:

  /myimages/image1.jpg

appended to it, resulting in:

  /images/myimages/image1.jpg

Posted at 03:05PM Feb 12, 2008 by Jan Luehe in Sun  |  Comments[2]