Where do I put config files for a webapp (war file)?

Question

To my understanding a war file is supposed to be dropped in. It's isn't intended to be unzipped by the person installing the webapp. Inside my web app I have some xml files I access to get configuration information for how the servlet works. This xml file is intended to be edited by the sysadmin using the webapp. So, it's obvious I can't put my xml file inside my war file otherwise they'd have to unzip it to edit it. So my question is, where do I put it? What is the normal place to put stuff like this for a webapp?
Example:
I make a servlet (or jsp/custom tags) that generates an explorer-like directory tree. It reads the tree folders and files from an xml file. So one sysadmin might make a tree that looks like this:
Fruit
|-apples
| |-Gala
|-oranges
|-pears
another sysadmin might make a tree that looks like this:
Bookstore
|-Technical Books
| |- JSP to go
|-Children's Books
|-Dr Seuss
And these are defined in the xml file.
It's driving me crazy because I want to make my webapp deployable in a war file. Since I have to unzip it right now, the war file is useless.
Thanks,
David

Answer 1

I don't have the answer, but I understand your pain. I was trying to figure this out last year before my company went out of business and made this problem go away.
The issue is that you want to have a user install your webapp by deploying the war file and configure the app without unzipping the war file. If you can start the webapp first, why not just put the default or empty configuration file somewhere in your webapp director structure and write an administration servlet or JSP to configure it.
If you must configure the application before it can start up, the following might apply.
The obvious approach would be to install a properties or xml file separately from the war file and let the user edit that file. The problem is that your servlets and jsps need to be able to find it at run time. This is problematic because the current directory for relative paths seems to vary from one server to another. If I remember correctly, on Windows NT running Tomcat, current directory points to C:\jakarta-tomcat-x.x.x\bin. When running Websphere, it points to C:\WINNT. You can figure this out for the server your user is going to be running and have them put the file in one of those places. But I don't like putting my application files in places like that.
I can't remember at the moment how it works in other servers, but at least in Tomcat you might put the configuration file in the webapps directory with your war file. Then you could have your servlet do a getServletContext().getRealPath() or something like that and back up the path one level to get to the file.
At one point I thought it would be nice to put the path to the configuration file in the system environment, but we couldn't find any way in Java to get access to it.
Will.