Creating A File Resource Using Tomcat JNDI

Question

Hi guys,
My problem is that I am creating a web service and I cannot get to a properties file without creating an absolute reference to that file. If I was creating a servlet I would simple use getServletContext() method to get a relative reference to it. However since it is an axis web service i have to deploy my applications in the WEB-INF/services directory, and because it does not interact with the axis servlet I cannot use getServletContext(). So i thought I could create a JNDI file resource reference in the tomcatHome/conf/context.xml file, similar to how I created a JNDI connection pool. The resouce definition looks like this;
<Resource name="resource/dialogueEngineConfig" auth="Container"
                  type="java.io.File"
                  url="file:/Applications/apache-tomcat-5.5.1/webapps/axis2/META-INF/DialogueEngine.properties">
</Resource>now I tried to access the resource in my code like this;
// Obtain our environment naming
Context envCtx = (Context) new InitialContext().lookup("java:comp/env");
// Look up our file
File  f = (File) envCtx.lookup("resource/dialogueEngineConfig");However I get a NamingException; 'Cannot create resource instance'
I don't understand why I cant create a file resource in JNDI, it seems like a simple enough thing to do. Am I doing something wrong or missing something? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

Hello xalien,
I have the same problem. I need to access external xml config file via JNDI from my servlet, running on Tomcat 5.0.28. Have you manage to define an URL resource? If so, please provide an example how to do it. Many thanx.