Context path

Question

I have a web app in a war called my_war which is in an ear called my_ear
I have a jsp page called hello.jsp in directory "dude" (i.e. the directory structure in the war has a directory /dude with hello.jsp in it)
So to get to this page in my browser, I type
http://ip_address/my_ear/dude/hello.jsp
Note that by default, it uses the ear name which seems pretty sensible.
If I put <%=request.getContextPath()%> in this jsp page, I get "/my_ear"
This is also what I expected and I'm happy so far, I will refer to this value as the "context path"
Now say I have another jsp page dude2/booya.jsp
I want an html link between the 2.
I could get this by <%=request.getContextPath()%>/dude2/booya.jsp
I know I could also probably go ../dude2/booya.jsp, but I'd rather not.
To make my design a bit nicer, I would prefer to avoid calling <%=request.getContextPath()%> each time I want to get the context path. I'd rather store it globally. It can't change right?
Is there a way to get the context path on deployment of my web app.
e.g from the init method of a servlet that is set to load-on-startup

Answer 1

The context path can change if you deploy the war or ear differently. There is a context path setting in application.xml in the ear's META-INF. Your best bet is to use inheritance. You can make your JSPs/servlets extend a base servlet which could add another parameter to the service signature. That's kinda how JSP gets its other auto defined locals like request, response, and out. The downside is that you'd have to declare the new method in your JSPs unless you wanna get into creating/modifying the JSP servlet generator. I dunno, maybe that's not such a hot idea after all.
Cliff