Gotcha with non-top-level deployment in Tomcat

[rwalkerands]

I'm deploying an instance into Tomcat that has a third-level context path. Specifically, instead of something like /elda, the webapp is accessible at /third/level/elda. The quickest way to achieve this in Tomcat is to copy in the webapp not as elda.war, but as third#level#elda.war. To determine the context path, Tomcat replaces every hash with a slash.

Deploying this way breaks the Velocity error templates. Turning on debugging (adding log4j.logger.com.epimorphics.lda.renderers.velocity=DEBUG to log4j.properties) showed that the app looks for templates in:

file:/usr/share/tomcat/webapps/third%23level%23elda/_error_pages/velocity/

So %23 instead of each hash.

There are workarounds available:

1. Create a symbolic link, e.g., /usr/share/tomcat/elda_error_pages pointing to the _error_path directory, and add a _velocityPath variable (set to /usr/share/tomcat/elda_error_pages/velocity) to every spec file.
2. Don't deploy by relying on the naming convention of WAR files. Move the webapp out of Tomcat's webapp directory, rename it to something without hashes, and create a separate Tomcat context file conf/Catalina/localhost/third#level#elda.xml with docBase set to the renamed directory.

I have confirmed that both workarounds do work.