Do JBoss EAP 6 and WildFly support Virtual Directories?

[j.swiderski]

Hi,

In many servers it is possible to define fake path inside application which with help of the server maps to some folder outside of application context.

In Tomcat 7 it is possible with aliases, in Tomcat 6 by defining extra context in server.xml, in GlassFish through alternatedocroot, in Weblogic through virtual-directory-mapping element in weblogic.xml, in Jetty by defining extra handler in Jetty.xml.

In JBoss 6 AS it was possible by defining extra Context in context.xml and usage of mklink.

To give better understanding of what I'm talking about let me present example for Tomcat 8:

Inside MyApp/META-INF/context.xml I enter:
<Context antiJARLocking="true" path="/MyApp" reloadable="true" >

    <Resources>

       <PreResources base="C://myimages" className="org.apache.catalina.webresources.DirResourceSet" webAppMount="/images" />

   </Resources>

   <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"  allow=".*" />

</Context>

Now, path  MyApp/images will map to C://myimages directory which is outside of application context and even server. I keep uploaded images and files there.

----

In JBoss AS7 virtual directories are only possible through custom servlet. It seems to be also the case in WildFly and JBoss EAP. Can anyone confirm/deny?

Do any of these servers support it?

Are there any plans to introduce such feature?

Regards,

James

[jaysensharma]

In WildFly it is possible. WildFly’s undertow subsystem provides us a feature to configure the “handler” which can be used to achieve the same goal. please see:

How to store static contents outside WildFly installation and access them via Http ?

http://middlewaremagic.com/jboss/?p=2718

In JBossAS7/EAP6 you can try putting your static files inside the "$JBOSS_HOME/welcome-content"  (suppose you placed a sile with name "hello.html" in that directory) then it can be accessed as

http://localhost:8080/hello.html

Also apart from writing your custom Servlet to accomplish the same in JBossAS7/EAP6 you can also try using the "WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml" with the following tag <symbolic-linking-enabled>

Example:

<jboss-web version="7.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:jboss="http://www.jboss.com/xml/ns/javaee"
           xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.jboss.com/xml/ns/javaee jboss-web_7_0.xsd">
    <symbolic-linking-enabled>true</symbolic-linking-enabled>  
    <overlay>/PATH/TO/myimages</overlay>
</jboss-web>

For more information on this please see: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBPAPP6-1549

[j.swiderski]

Hi,

Jay SenSharma,  thank you for the excelent answer.

Regards,

James