> > Hello, I'm using Tomcat 7 embedded mode in my app. I've had a difficult time figuring out how to actually reload the context using WatchedResources and class reloading from WEB-INF/classes/.
What I've noticed is that using the Tomcat class addWebApp() utility function does not trigger WatchedResource to work. I've tried providing the context.xml directly via Context.setConfigFile() but that will not work. I scoured the Tomcat Catalina code and found that it only triggers this path if HostConfig gets set up so I've opted to make it function this way. The second issue I encountered is surprising. It appears that class reloading for classes WEB-INF/classes/ does not appear to be working as expected. Classes within WEB-INF/lib/ jar files do reload on a context reload. However the classes within WEB-INF/classes do not automatically reload it appears. What I discovered is that you have to forcefully add these classes to the search path by calling WebappClassLoader.findResource(), then call WeappClassLoader.findClass() to cache them. If these are missing it appears to me that any dynamic changes to classes in the folder will not trigger a reload or the new classes won't be loaded even when using WebappClassLoader.loadClass(). I believe this issue is not related to embedded Tomcat and will affect normal tomcat as well. I managed to workaround these issue, but I'm wondering if there's some assumptions I'm missing to make reloading work 'out of the box' with the standard WebappClassLoader. Has anyone encountered this behavior? Thanks for the help. -Jose
