Question

I map all requests to /* to a specific servlet.
My static content is hidden by this configuration.

How can i allow access to specific files (such as crossdomain.xml)?

Answer 1

When you map /* to a specific servlet, all requests will be forwarded to that servlet, unless you provide a more explicit mapping to another servlet.

That is, if you have /* mapped to ServletA, and /static/* mapped to ServletB, then following Servlets will get called.

http://localhost:8080/abc.jpg            -> ServletA
http://localhost:8080/static/abc.jpg     -> ServletB
http://localhost:8080/xyz/abc.jpg        -> ServletA

So one option you have is to write a Servlet to handle the static content, which will grab the file and return it as response. You can map that servlet to a prefixed by something like /static/*. This requires that all URL references to your static files to be updated to contain this ‘/static’ part.

If that is not feasible for you, then probably you can use the same servlet, but mapped to multiple URL patterns (probably by extension) as follows.

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>static-servlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>xxx.yyy.StaticServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>static-servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.xml</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>static-servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

If you want this to be fine-grained to the level of each file, you can map the servlet to your file URL as well.