Content in a Web Module

Question

Hi,
I am having a very irritating problem. I want to use a filter to transform some content however I do not want the content to have to be inside the .war archive.
If I place the content in any other location the filter cannot be set to operate on it.
If I place the content in the .war archive then every time a designer changes the content I have to rebuild and re-deploy the web-module.
Any idea how I can either have content (which is not in a web-module) be accessed through a filter , or how I can have content appear in a web-module from some other location?
Please help, this is a real show-stopper for our project. Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't think filters are really the way to go about this, rather, create a servlet that handles requests something along these lines:
void service(HTTPServletRequest request, HTTPServletResponse response) {
  // get document root, base directory for all the xml files
  String docRoot = request.getServletConfig().getParameter("docroot");
  // get the document name
  String path = request.getPathInfo();
  // do some checking on path to make sure it doesn't contain
  // '..' or anything like that, throw an exception if it does.
  // create a java.io.File object representing the file:
  File file = new File(docRoot, path);
  if (/*browser is IE6*/) {
    // open the file (using FileInputStream) and copy it to
    // request.getOutputStream()
  else {
    // pass the file through an xslt transformation that outputs
    // to request.getOutputStream()
}If this servlet is bound to a context called "context1", and the servlet is bound to "xml", requests for eg. /context1/xml/dira/dirb/doc1.xml will result in request.getPathInfo() returning "/dira/dirb/doc1.xml", given that the servlet-mapping element in web.xml is specified correctly (use a wild card: /xml/*).
And be warned, I just typed this in without trying to compile it, so it probably contains bugs!