Reinhard Poetz wrote:
Carsten Ziegeler wrote:
Some raised the concern on this list that this is not very intuitiv and
they would like to include WEB-INF/cocoon/* to be read by default as
well.
Adding support for this is very easy, it's just one more line of code,
so this is not the deal. The question is if we want to provide this
extra location or not?
I'm in the not camp. Starting with 2.2 there shouldn't be any Cocoon
applications anymore that are not developed as blocks. The only
exception from this rule of decentralization is Spring properties in
WEB-INF/cocoon/spring as there should be a way to set them globally.
Let me simulate a scenario: suppose I have a generators block out of
Cocoon distro, with some default configuration (size of pools, etc.),
now suppose I want those properties to change for my application: I
presume I have to set those properties in my application's JAR
(provided, of course, it is deployed as a block), right ?
And what if my application's JAR is read before the generators block JAR
(as it may well happen, since they're in alphabetic order) ?
Hence the need for a separate properties file, a file of last resort to
set application-wide properties, possibly properties used by many blocks.
But, come to think of it, a sysadmin may want to tailor pools size
according to each server my application runs on, hence system-wide
properties may come in handy.
If such system-wide properties are under classes/META-INF/... they are
subject to the same alphabetic order rules of JARs' properties, and this
could, just possibly, lead to some anomalies if other blocks are added
afterwards.
Therefore, I think using WEB-INF/cocoon to store system-wide properties,
properties assured to be read after *all* the properties in
classes/META-INF/..., may still make sense.
So, according to this line of thought, the loading order would be:
1) Properties in JARs (blocks, actually) to be read from
classes/META-INF/...
2) Properties *not* in JARs to be read from classes/META-INF/... and to
overwrite the ones in JARs (as Carsten just did).
3) Properties in WEB-INF/cocoon to overwrite the ones in 1 an 2.
Regards,
--------------------
Luca Morandini
www.lucamorandini.it
--------------------
