Whats the need to put the Tomcat's context.xml inside META-INF of Web App

1
votes

I have a basic question,there are two incidents happended while working with Tomcat.

1.I want to share the context between two web applications deployed under same Tomcat container, all I want to do is make crossContext=true in context.xml initally, I did that in {CATALINAHOME}/conf/context.xml didnt worked out. Later I got the solution from our own Stack Overflow then I put the context.xml inside META-INF, everything worked as expected.

2.Similarly when I configure the Data Source for my Web App,I did the same initally then I put the context.xml with required JDBC configurations inside META-INF then it got worked.

So my question is why Tomcat is picking the context.xml configuration's from META-INF? What I'm missing while configuring in {CATALINAHOME}/conf's context.xml ? What I need to understand ?

Need your knowledge and the advice

1
servletstomcat6

1 Answers

2
votes

Apparently you're working with Tomcat from inside an IDE like Eclipse. This way Tomcat's own /context.xml will indeed be ignored. The IDE uses just sole the server engine and creates a separate deploy and work space in the IDE environment. In Eclipse, you can find a copy of the /context.xml in the Servers project. This one is editable and will be applied. But providing another one in webapp's /META-INF is of course also a solution and it's more portable.

Tomcat's own /context.xml is only used when you start it standalone by startup.bat/sh and so on, outside the IDE environment.