WildFly - getting resource from WAR

Question

I am using the following method to get a resource from WAR file in WildFly:

this.getClass().getResource(relativePath)

It works when the application is deployed as exploded WAR. It used to work with compressed WAR, too. Yesterday, I did a clean and rebuild of project in Eclipse, and it just stopped working.

When I check the resource root:

logger.info(this.getClass().getResource("/").toExternalForm());

I get this:

file:/C:/JBoss/wildfly8.1.0.CR1/modules/system/layers/base/org/jboss/as/ejb3/main/timers/

So, no wonder it doesn't work. It probably has something to do with JBoss module loading, but I don't know if this is a bug or normal behavior.

I found various similar problems on StackOverflow, but no applicable solution. One of the suggestions is to use ServletContext like so:

@Resource
private WebServiceContext wsContext;
...
ServletContext servletContext = (ServletContext)this.wsContext.getMessageContext()
        .get(MessageContext.SERVLET_CONTEXT);
servletContext.getResource(resourcePath);

But, when I try to obtain MessageContext in this manner, I get an IllegalStateException. So I am basically stuck. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I ran into this same problem, and rather than define the resource as a shared module, I ended up working around this by using a ServletContextListener in my WAR.

In the contextInitialized method, I got the ServletContext from the ServletContextEvent and used its getResource("/WEB-INF/myResource") to get the URL to the resource inside my WAR file. It appears that in the ServletContextListener, the .getResource() method resolves as expected rather than to the "/modules/system/layers/base/org/jboss/as/ejb3/main/timers/" url. That URL can then be stored in the ServletContext for later use by your servlets or in an injected ApplicationScoped CDI bean.

@WebListener
public class ServletInitializer implements ServletContextListener {

    @Override
    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) {
        try {
            final ServletContext context = sce.getServletContext();
            final URL resourceUrl = context.getResource("/WEB-INF/myResource");
            context.setAttribute("myResourceURL", resourceUrl);
        } catch (final MalformedURLException e) {
            throw new AssertionError("Resource not available in WAR file", e);
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent sce) {}
}

or

@WebListener
public class ServletInitializer implements ServletContextListener {

    @Inject
    private SomeApplicationScopedBean myBean;

    @Override
    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) {
        try {
            final ServletContext context = sce.getServletContext();
            final URL resourceUrl = context.getResource("/WEB-INF/myResource");
            myBean.setResourceUrl(resourceUrl);
        } catch (final MalformedURLException e) {
            throw new AssertionError("Resource not available in WAR file", e);
        }  
    }

    @Override
    public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent sce) {}
}