Developing Web Applications, Servlets, and JSPs for WebLogic Server
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This document provides a complete reference for the elements in the WebLogic Server-specific deployment descriptor weblogic.xml. If your Web application does not contain a weblogic.xml deployment descriptor, WebLogic Server automatically selects the default values of the deployment descriptor elements. To see the schema for weblogic.xml
, go to http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/weblogic-web-app.xsd.
The following sections describe the complex deployment descriptor elements that can be defined in the weblogic.xml deployment descriptor under the root element <weblogic-web-app>
:
The description element is a text description of the Web application.
The weblogic-version
element indicates the version of WebLogic Server on which this Web application (as defined in the root element <weblogic-web-app>
) is intended to be deployed. This element is informational only and is not used by WebLogic Server.
The security-role-assignment
element declares a mapping between a Web application security role and one or more principals in WebLogic Server, as shown in the following example.
<security-role-assignment>
<role-name>
PayrollAdmin</role-name>
<principal-name>
Tanya</principal-name>
<principal-name>
Fred</principal-name>
<principal-name>
system</principal-name>
</security-role-assignment>
You can also use it to mark a given role as an externally defined role, as shown in the following example:
<security-role-assignment>
<role-name>
roleadmin</role-name>
<externally-defined/>
</security-role-assignment>
Notes: In the <security-role-assignment>
element, either <principal-name>
or <externally-defined>
must be defined. Both cannot be omitted.
The following table describes the elements you can define within a security-role-assignment
element.
Specifies the name of a principal that is defined in the security realm. You can use multiple |
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Specifies that a particular security role is defined globally in a security realm; WebLogic Server uses this security role as the principal name, rather than looking it up in a global realm. When the security role and its principal-name mapping are defined elsewhere, this is used as an indicative placeholder. |
Note: If you do not define a security-role-assignment element and its subelements, the Web application container implicitly maps the role name as a principal name and logs a warning. The EJB container does not deploy the module if mappings are not defined.
Consider the following usage scenarios for the role name is "role_xyz"
The run-as-role-assignment element maps a run-as role name (a subelement of the servlet element) in web.xml to a valid user name in the system. The value can be overridden for a given servlet by the run-as-principal-name element in the servlet-descriptor. If the run-as-role-assignment is absent for a given role name, the Web application container uses the first principal-name defined in the security-role-assignment. The following example illustrates how to use the run-as-role-assignment element.
<run-as-role-assignment>
<role-name>RunAsRoleName</role-name>
<run-as-principal-name>joe</run-as-principal-name>
</run-as-role-assignment>
The following table describes the elements you can define within a run-as-role-assignment
element.
The a weblogic.xml deployment descriptor refers to the reference-descriptorGroup, which is part of the weblogic-j2ee-xsd file.The following sub-elements of reference-descriptorGroup are used by the
The |
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The |
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The resource-description
element is used to map the JNDI name of a server resource to an EJB resource reference in WebLogic Server.
The following table describes the elements you can define within a resource-description
element
The resource-env-description
element maps a resource-env-ref
, declared in the ejb-jar.xml
deployment descriptor, to the JNDI name of the server resource it represents.
The following table describes the elements you can define within a resource-env-description
element
The following table describes the elements you can define within a ejb-reference-description
element
The following table describes the elements you can define within a service-reference-description
element
The session-descriptor
elements that define parameters for servlet sessions.
Sets the time, in seconds, that WebLogic Server waits before timing out a session. The default value is 3600 seconds. On busy sites, you can tune your application by adjusting the timeout of sessions. While you want to give a browser client every opportunity to finish a session, you do not want to tie up the server needlessly if the user has left the site or otherwise abandoned the session. This element can be overridden by the |
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Sets the time, in seconds, that WebLogic Server waits between doing house-cleaning checks for timed-out and invalid sessions, and deleting the old sessions and freeing up memory. Use this element to tune WebLogic Server for best performance on high traffic sites. |
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Enables Web applications to share HTTP sessions when the value is set to This element is ignored if turned on at the Web application level. |
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Sets the size of the session ID. The minimum value is 8 bytes and the maximum value is Integer.MAX_VALUE. If you are writing a WAP application, you must use URL rewriting because the WAP protocol does not support cookies. Also, some WAP devices have a 128-character limit on URL length (including attributes), which limits the amount of data that can be transmitted using URL re-writing. To allow more space for attributes, use this attribute to limit the size of the session ID that is randomly generated by WebLogic Server. You can also limit the length to a fixed 52 characters, and disallow special characters, by setting the WAPEnabled attribute. For more information, see URL Rewriting and Wireless Access Protocol in Developing Web Applications for WebLogic Server. |
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Sets the maximum limit for memory/replicated sessions. Without the ability to configure bound in-memory servlet session use, as new sessions are continually created, the server eventually throws out of memory. To protect against this, WebLogic Server provides a configurable bound on the number of sessions created. When this number is exceeded, the weblogic.servlet.SessionCreationException occurs for each attempt to create a new session. This feature applies to both replicated and non-replicated in-memory sessions. To configure bound in-memory servlet session use, you set the limitation in the max-in-memory-sessions element. |
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Use of session cookies is enabled by default and is recommended, but you can disable them by setting this property to |
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Defines the session tracking cookie name. Defaults to |
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Defines the session tracking cookie path. If not set, this attribute defaults to |
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Specifies the domain for which the cookie is valid. For example, setting The domain name must have at least two components. Setting a name to If not set, this attribute defaults to the server that issued the cookie. For more information, see |
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Specifies the comment that identifies the session tracking cookie in the cookie file. |
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Tells the browser to only send the cookie back over an HTTPS connection. This ensures that the cookie ID is secure and should only be used on Websites that use HTTPS. Session Cookies over HTTP no longer work if this feature is enabled. You should disable the |
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Sets the life span of the session cookie, in seconds, after which it expires on the client. The default value is -1 (unlimited) For more information about cookies, see Using Sessions and Session Persistence. |
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Sets the persistent store method to one of the following options:
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Sets the name of the cookie used for cookie-based persistence. The For more information, see Using Cookie-Based Session Persistence. |
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Specifies the storage directory used for file-based persistence Ensure that you have enough disk space to store the number of valid sessions multiplied by the size of each session. You can find the size of a session by looking at the files created in the You can make file-persistent sessions clusterable by making this directory a shared directory among different servers. |
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Specifies the name of a JDBC connection pool to be used for persistence storage. |
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Specifies the database table name used to store JDBC-based persistent sessions. This applies only when The |
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Serves as an alternative name for the wl_max_inactive_interval column name. This jdbc-column-name-max-inactive-interval element applies only to JDBC-based persistence. It is required for certain databases that do not support long column names. |
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Note: This is a deprecated item for this release. Sets the time, in seconds, that WebLogic Server waits before timing out a JDBC connection, where x is the number of seconds between. |
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Enables URL rewriting, which encodes the session ID into the URL and provides session tracking if cookies are disabled in the browser. |
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When set to "Cache-control: no-cache=set-cookie" This indicates that the proxy caches do not cache the cookies. |
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The latest servlet specification requires containers to encode the session ID in path parameters. Certain Web servers do not work well with path parameters. In such cases, the encode-session-id-in-query-params element should be set to true. (The default is |
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Used in ServletSessionRuntimeMBean. The getMainAttribute() of the ServletSessionRuntimeMBean returns the session attribute value using this string as a key. This element is useful for tagging session runtime information for different sessions. |
The jsp-descriptor
element specifies a list of configuration parameters for the JSP compiler. The following table describes the elements you can define within a jsp-descriptor
element..
Sets the interval, in seconds, at which WebLogic Server checks to see if JSP files have changed and need recompiling. Dependencies are also checked and recursively reloaded if changed. If set to 0, pages are checked on every request. This default is preset for a development environment. If set to In a production environment where changes to a JSP are rare, change the value of pageCheckSeconds to 60 or greater, according to your tuning requirements, or to -1 to disable page checking and recompiling. |
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When set to true, WebLogic Server automatically precompiles all modified JSPs when the Web application is deployed or re-deployed or when starting WebLogic Server. |
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When set to true, WebLogic Server continues precompiling all modified JSPs even if some of those JSPs fail during compilation. Only takes effect when precompile is set to true. |
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Saves the Java files that are generated as an intermediary step in the JSP compilation process. Unless this parameter is set to |
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When set to |
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The name of a directory where WebLogic Server saves the generated Java and compiled class files for a JSP. |
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When set to false, this parameter ensures that expressions with "null" results are printed as " ". |
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Specifies the default character set used in the JSP page. Use standard Java character set names. If not set, this attribute defaults to the encoding for your platform. A JSP page directive (included in the JSP code) overrides this setting. For example: |
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Specifies the package prefix into which all JSP pages are compiled. |
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When true, upon the first request for a JSP the newly created JspStub is mapped to the exact request. If exactMapping is set to false, the Web application container generates non-exact url mapping for JSPs. exactMapping allows path info for JSP pages. |
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The default file name in which WebLogic Server saves the generated Java and compiled class files for a JSP. |
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Allows runtime expression values in the name attribute of the |
The auth-filter element specifies an authentication filter HttpServlet class.
Note: This is a deprecated element for the current release. Instead, use servlet authentication filters.
The <container-descriptor>
element specifies a list of parameters that affect the behavior of the Web application.
Add the <check-auth-on-forward/>
element when you want to require authentication of forwarded requests from a servlet or JSP. Omit the tag if you do not want to require re-authentication. For example:
<container-descriptor>
<check-auth-on-forward/>
</container-descriptor>
Note: As a best practice, BEA does not recommend that you enable the check-auth-on-forward property.
The <filter-dispatched-requests-enabled>
element controls whether or not filters are applied to dispatched requests. The default value is false.
Note: Because 2.4 servlets are backward compatible with 2.3 servlets (per the 2.4 specification), when 2.3 descriptor elements are detected by WebLogic Server, the <filter-dispatched-requests-enabled>
element defaults to true.
The <redirect-with-absolute-url>
element controls whether the javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse.SendRedirect()
method redirects using a relative or absolute URL. Set this element to false
if you are using a proxy HTTP server and do not want the URL converted to a non-relative link.
The default behavior is to convert the URL to a non-relative link.
user readable data used in a redirect.
The <index-directory-enabled> element controls whether or not to automatically generate an HTML directory listing if no suitable index file is found.
The default value is false
(does not generate a directory). Values are true
or false
.
The <index-directory-sort-by> element defines the order in which the directory listing generated by weblogic.servlet.FileServlet is sorted. Valid sort-by values are NAME, LAST_MODIFIED, and SIZE. The default sort-by value is NAME.
The <servlet-reload-check-secs> element defines whether a WebLogic Server will check to see if a servlet has been modified, and if it has been modified, reloads it. The -1 value tells the server never to check the servlets, 0 tells the server to always check the servlets, and the default is to check each 1 second.
A value specified in the console will always take precedence over a manually specified value.
The <resource-reload-check-secs> element is used to perform metadata caching for cached resources that are found in the resource path in the Web application scope. This parameter identifies how often WebLogic Server checks whether a resource has been modified and if so, it reloads it.
The value -1 means never reload.
The value 0 means always reload.
Values specified for this parameter using the Admin Console are given precedence.
The <single-threaded-servlet-pool-size> element defines the size of the pool used for SingleThreadMode instance pools. The default value is 5.
Note: SingleThreadMode instance pools are deprecated in this release.
The <session-monitoring-enabled> element, if set to true, allows runtime MBeans to be created for sessions. When set to false, the default value, runtime MBeans are not created. A value specified in the console takes precedence over a value set manually.
The <save-sessions-enabled> element controls whether session data is cleaned up during redeploy or undeploy. It affects memory and replicated sessions. Setting the value to true means session data is saved. Setting to false means session data will be destroyed when the Web application is redeployed or undeployed. The default is false.
The <prefer-web-inf-classes> element, if set to true, will cause classes located in the WEB-INF directory of a Web application to be loaded in preference to classes loaded in the application or system classloader. The default value is false. A value specified in the console will take precedence over a value set manually.
The <default-mime-type> element default value is null. This element allows the user to specify the default mime type for a content-type for which the extension is not mapped.
The <client-cert-proxy-enabled> element default value is true. When set to true, WebLogic Server passes identity certificates from the clients to the backend servers. Also, WebLogic Server is notified whether to honor or discard the incoming WL-Proxy-Client-Cert header.
A proxy-server plugin encodes each identity certification in the WL-Proxy-Client-Cert header and passes it to the backend WebLogic Server instances. Each WebLogic Server instance takes the certificate information from the header, ensured it came from a secure source, and uses that information to authenticate the user. For the background WebLogic Server instances, this parameter must be set to true (either at the cluster/server level or at the Web application level).
If you set this element to true, use a weblogic.security.net.ConnectionFilter to ensure that each WebLogic Server instance accepts connections only from the machine on which the proxy-server plugin is running. If you specify true without using a connection filter, a potential security vulnerability is created because the WL-Proxy-Client-Cert header can be spoofed.
The <relogin-enabled> element is a backward compatibility parameter. If a user has logged in already and tries to access a resource for which s/he does not have privileges, a FORBIDDEN (403) response occurs.
In the security-constraints elements defined in web.xml descriptor of a Web application, the auth-constraint element indicates the user roles that should be permitted access to this resource collection. Here role-name = "*" is a compact syntax for indicating all roles in the Web application. In past releases, role-name = "*" was treated as all users/roles defined within the realm.
This allow-all-roles element is a backward compatibility switch to restore old behavior. The default behavior is to allow all roles defined in the Web application. The value specified in weblogic-xml takes precedence over the value defined in the WebAppContainerMBean.
To use native I/O while serving static files with weblogic.servlet.FileServlet, which is implicitly registered as the default servlet, set native-io-enabled to true. (The default value is false.) native-io-enabled element applies only on Windows.
The minimum-native-file-size element applies only when native-io-enabled is set to true. It sets the minimum file size for using native I/O. If the file being served is larger than this value, native I/O is used. If you do not set this value, the default value used is 4K.
When the disable-implicit-servlet-mappings flag is set to true, the Web application container does not create implicit mappings for internal servlets (*.jsp, *.class, and so on); only for the default servlet mapping. A typical use case for turning off implicit servlet mappings would be when configuring HttpClusterServlet or HttpProxyServlet.
When optimistic-serialization is turned on, WebLogic Server does not serialize-deserialize context and request attributes upon getAttribute(name) when the request is dispatched across servlet contexts.
This means that you must make sure that the attributes common to Web applications are scoped to a common parent classloader (application scoped) or you must place them in the system classpath if the two Web applications do not belong to the same application.
When optimistic-serialization is turned off (default value), WebLogic Server serialize-deserializes context and request attributes upon getAttribute(name) to avoid the possibility of ClassCastExceptions.
The optimistic-serialization value can also be specified at domain level in the WebAppContainerMBean, which applies for all Web applications. The value in weblogic.xml, if specified, overrides the domain level value.
HTTP Sessions are identified with a monitoring ID. By default, the monitoring ID for a given HTTP session is a random string (not the same as a session ID for security reasons). This monitoring ID can be configured by setting the monitoring-attribute-name
element in session-descriptor of the weblogic.xml
deployment descriptor and then setting a session attribute the defined monitoring-attribute-name
. The toString()
of the session attribute value will then be used as a monitoring ID.
The monitoring-attribute-name
element is useful for tagging session runtime information for different sessions. For example, you can set it to "username", if you have a "username" attribute that is unique.
The WebAppComponentRuntimeBean.getSessionIds()
method returns an array of session attribute values with this name. If it is not set, it returns an array of randomly generated Strings.
The <charset-params> element is used to define code set behavior for non-unicode operations. For example:
<charset-params>
<input-charset>
<resource-path>/*</resource-path>
<java-charset-name>UTF-8</java-charset-name>
</input-charset>
</charset-params>
Use the <input-charset>
element to define which character set is used to read GET
and POST
data. For example:
<input-charset>
<resource-path>/foo</resource-path>
<java-charset-name>SJIS</java-charset-name>
</input-charset>
For more information, see Determining the Encoding of an HTTP Request.
The following table describes the elements you can define within a <input-charset>
element
A path which, if included in the URL of a request, signals WebLogic Server to use the Java character set specified by |
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Use the <charset-mapping>
element to map an IANA character set name to a Java character set name. For example:
<charset-mapping>
<iana-charset-name>Shift-JIS</iana-charset-name>
<java-charset-name>SJIS</java-charset-name>
</charset-mapping>
For more information, see Mapping IANA Character Sets to Java Character Sets.
The following table describes the elements you can define within a <charset-mapping>
element
Specifies the IANA character set name that is to be mapped to the Java character set specified by the |
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Use the virtual-directory-mapping element to specify document roots other than the default document root of the Web application for certain kinds of requests, such as image requests. All images for a set of Web applications can be stored in a single location, and need not be copied to the document root of each Web application that uses them. For an incoming request, if a virtual directory has been specified servlet container will search for the requested resource first in the virtual directory and then in the Web application's original document root. This defines the precedence if the same document exists in both places.
<virtual-directory-mapping>
<local-path>c:/usr/gifs</local-path>
<url-pattern>/images/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>
</virtual-directory-mapping>
<virtual-directory-mapping>
<local-path>c:/usr/common_jsps.jar</local-path>
<url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
</virtual-directory-mapping>
The following table describes the elements you can define within the virtual-directory-mapping element.
Contains the URL pattern of the mapping. Must follow the rules specified in Section 11.2 of the Servlet API Specification. |
The WebLogic Server implementation of virtual directory mapping requires that you have a directory that matches the url-pattern of the mapping. The image example requires that you create a directory named images at c:/usr/gifs/images. This allows the servlet container to find images for multiple Web applications in the images directory.
Use this element to specify a class for URL pattern matching. The WebLogic Server default URL match mapping class is weblogic.servlet.utils.URLMatchMap, which is based on J2EE standards. Another implementation included in WebLogic Server is SimpleApacheURLMatchMap, which you can plug in using the url-match-map element.
Rule for SimpleApacheURLMatchMap:
If you map *.jws to JWSServlet then
http://foo.com/bar.jws/baz will be resolved to JWSServlet with pathInfo = baz.
Configure the URLMatchMap to be used in weblogic.xml as in the following example:
<url-match-map>
weblogic.servlet.utils.SimpleApacheURLMatchMap
</url-match-map>
The security-permission element specifies a single security permission based on the Security policy file syntax. Refer to the following URL for Sun's implementation of the security permission specification:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/security/PolicyFiles.html#FileSyntax
Disregard the optional codebase and signedBy clauses.
<security-permission-spec>
grant { permission java.net.SocketPermission "*", "resolve" };
</security-permission-spec>
permission java.net.SocketPermission is the permission class name.
"*" represents the target name.
The context-root element defines the context root of this stand-alone Web application. If the Web application is part of an EAR, not stand-alone, specify the context root in the EAR's META-INF/application.xml file. A context-root setting in application.xml takes precedence over context-root setting in weblogic.xml.
Note that this weblogic.xml element only acts on deployments using the two-phase deployment model.
The order of precedence for context root determination for a Web application is as follows:
Note: The context-root element cannot be set for individual Web applications in EAR libraries. It can only bet set for Web application libraries.
Use the wl-dispatch-policy element to assign the Web application to a configured execute queue by identifying the execute queue name. This Web application-level parameter can be overridden at the individual servlet or jsp level by using the per-servlet-dispatch-policy element.
Use the servlet-descriptor element to aggregate the servlet-specific elements.
The following table describes the elements you can define within the servlet-descriptor element.
The work-manager
element is a sub-element of the <weblogic-web-app>
element. You can define the following elements within the work-manager
element.
The logging
element is a sub-element of the <weblogic-web-app>
element. You can define the following elements within the logging
element.
The library-ref element references a library module, which is intended to be used as a Web application library in the current Web application.
<library-ref>
<library-name>
WebAppLibraryFoo</library-name>
<specification-version>2.0</specification-version>
<implementation-version>8.1beta</implementation-version>
<exact-match>false</exact-match>
</library-ref>
Only the following sub-elements are relevant to Web applications: library-name
, specification-version
, implementation-version
, and exact-match.
You can define the following elements within the library-ref
element.
Several backwards compatibility flags have been added to allow you to restore behavior seen in releases prior to WebLogic Server 9.0. For a complete list and description of these flags and for all information about Web Application, JSP, and Servlet backwards compatibility, see Compatibility with Previous Releases in Upgrading WebLogic Application Environments.
To configure your Web container at a global level, use the WebAppContainerMBean. For information on the WebAppContainerMBean attributes and how to use them to specify domain-wide defaults for all of your Web applications, see the WebAppContainerMBean at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13222_01/wls/docs90/wlsmbeanref/mbeans/WebAppContainerMBean.html.
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