JBoss equivalence of glassfish alternate docroot - jsf

Question

This is very easy using Glassfish:
Consider my absolute path on unix /apps/static_content/.
Using Glassfish, I will simply define alternate doc root as:
<property name="alternatedocroot_1"
value="from=/static/* dir=/apps/static_content/"/>
When I upload my images and other data files, I can save them to the /apps/static_content directory, and within my JSF page I can display my static content normally as:
<p:graphicsimage value="/static/external_web_app.png"/>
I really need to achieve the same functionality in JBoss AS7
How can I do this?

Answer 1

This question is a little bit old, but answering if someone need to do this with newer versions of JBoss/Wildfly.
JBoss AS was renamed to Wildfly from version 8 (i.e. Wildfly 8 is JBoss AS 8) and Red Hat supported version of JBoss was renamed to JBoss EAP. So this applies to:
Wildfly (any version)
JBoss EAP (from version 7)
First thing to note is that "Alternate doc root" feature in glassfish doesn't work like that. Please take a look at this question for an explanation of the behavior of this feature: Alternate docroot not working on glassfish 4
Now, to answer this question, JBoss/Wildfly is build upon Undertow, that let you do exactly what you need. Refer at this question on how to configure undertow as a web server for static content: How to configure Wildfly to serve static content (like images)?

Answer 2

Option 1: You could try to deploy a separate exploded .war file, and use that for your static content
In your case: In .../jboss-7/standalone/deployments/ there must be a static.war/.
So the uploads go into this directory, and the content is served back the normal way.
As for details, see Is it possible to deploy an exploded war file (unzipped war) in JBoss AS 7
As pointed out by BalusC: You must not redeploy/remove this directory, as soon as data has been uploaded. You should have a regular backup of this directory.
As far as I know this is the only possibility to do it by configuration/setup only.
Option 2: Create separate webapp with name static.war. Add a servlet to stream the static content
This way there is no need to upload/store the files into the file system below ../deployments/, it could be any directory, but you need an additional servlet, so it's solved programatically.
A simple streaming servlet could look like this (just streaming - no authentication etc.):
public class DownloadServlet extends HttpServlet {
#Override
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
final File dir = new File("/var/cms/storage/");
final String start = "/static/";
final String relativePath = request.getRequestURI().substring(
request.getRequestURI().indexOf(start) + start.length());
final File file = new File(dir, relativePath);
final String ct = URLConnection.guessContentTypeFromName(file.getName());
response.setContentType(ct);
final InputStream is =
new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(file));
try {
final boolean closeOs = true;
org.apache.commons.fileupload.util.Streams.copy
(is, response.getOutputStream(), closeOs);
} finally {
is.close();
}
}
Map all URLs to this servlet:
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>DownloadServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
The name static.war provides the /static/ web context, so that should make it compatible with the URLs in your code.

Answer 3

If you explore jboss directory you will find that there are many you can use to store different type of data like jboss.serer.data.dir .
You can try asking this directory path via system properties and store in a folder the data your services are using, under such directory.
String path = System.getProperty("jboss.server.data.dir");
Then you can use path as you want, if is just static as shown in your example you set directly the name of the directory.
This should work, I hope :p
ps: as the previous answer suggest the saved data will keep in the directory, and you must not redeploy/remove this directory.. It will keep your data there..