Subclassing WebdavServlet

[Michael Wille]

Hello All,
I would like to know if its possible to subclass the webdav servlet 
that comes with Tomcat 5.x.  We have need of webdav in our application, 
but need to provide a different JNDI InitialContext then the file 
system.  The thought was we could just override the getResources() 
method in WebdavServlet to return our own context.

What follows is a description of what we are doing:
It seems there is at least one obstacle to doing this.  We would have 
to move/copy the jar files: servlets-default.jar, servlets-common.jar, 
and servlets-webdav.jar to the common/lib folder.  It seemed when we 
attempted to move the files to common/lib, all of the default webapps 
couldn't be loaded as well as some of our application servlets.  When 
we leave the servlets*.jar files in both server/lib and common/lib, an 
exception is thrown when accessing our servlet:

javax.servlet.ServletException: Error instantiating servlet class 
com.test.webdav.XDav

And this is caused by:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org.apache.catalina.servlets.DefaultServlet

This seems strange considering the app should have access to the 
servlets-default.jar now that it is in common.  Or is there an issue 
with libs in both server and common?

Any help is hugely appreciated.
Thanks!
-Mike Wille
Our subclassed servlet (with only test code for the InitialContext):
package com.test.webdav;
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import javax.naming.directory.InitialDirContext;
import javax.naming.directory.DirContext;
import org.apache.catalina.servlets.*;
public class XDav extends WebdavServlet  {
        // need to dup this here because these have
        // private access in apaches webdavservlet      
        protected static final String METHOD_HEAD               = "HEAD";
        protected static final String METHOD_PROPFIND   = "PROPFIND";
        protected static final String METHOD_PROPPATCH  = "PROPPATCH";
        protected static final String METHOD_MKCOL              = "MKCOL";
        protected static final String METHOD_COPY               = "COPY";
        protected static final String METHOD_MOVE               = "MOVE";
        protected static final String METHOD_LOCK               = "LOCK";
        protected static final String METHOD_UNLOCK             = "UNLOCK";
        
        protected Logger logger;
        public void init (ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
                // wake your parents
                super.init(config);
        }
	public void destroy() {
		// kill your parents
		super.destroy();
	}
	
	/**
	 * Get resources. This method will try to retrieve the resources 
through
	 * JNDI first, then in the servlet context if JNDI has failed (it 
could be
	 * disabled). It will return null.
	 *
	 * @return A JNDI DirContext, or null.
	 */
	protected DirContext getResources() {

                InitialDirContext result = null;
                // Try the servlet context
                try {
                        //result = new IntitialLibraryContext();
                        result.bind("directory 1", "directory 1");
                        result.bind("directory 2", "directory 2");
                        result.bind("directory 3", "directory 3");
                        result.bind("directory 4", "directory 4");
                        result.bind("directory 3/subdirectory 5", "subdirectory 5");
                        
                        
                } catch(Exception e) {
                        logger.warning(UtilityTank.getErrorDetail(e));
                }
                return result;
        }       
}