WAR File Deployment

The default deployment for ExtraView is as an exploded directory. However, like many other web applications, ExtraView can be deployed as a .war file. When deploying ExtraView as a .war file, there are configuration parameters that must be modified from the default values, in order to allow the application to write log files and temporary files to locations outside of the application subdirectories that are the default paths.

Prior to building the .war file, you will modify the WEB-INF/configuration/Configuration.properties file to set the database connection information, as well as all other configuration settings for your installation.

You will also need to modify the following settings within the Configuration.properties file:

LOG_FILE_PATH_NAME
CHART_DIR
TEMP_DIR
DATA_DIR

These settings should be commented, and the following parameters and appropriate values should be used instead:

LOG_FILE_PATH_NAME_ABSOLUTE = c:pathtologfileEVJ.log
CHART_DIR_ABSOLUTE = c:pathtotempfolder
TEMP_DIR_ABSOLUTE = c:pathtotempfolder
DATA_DIR_ABSOLUTE = c:pathtotempfolder

The selected paths must already exist on the file system, and must be writeable by the user that will start up the application server process. Obviously, you should alter the path names to suit your server.

WAR File Deployment in Clustered Systems

If you will be deploying the .war file to multiple nodes (i.e. you have a clustered system), and each node is on a different machine, please ensure that each node has the same path.

Note: each node will need to write to its own log file, so if multiple nodes are on the same machine, or if the LOG_FILE_PATH_NAME_ABSOLUTE is on a shared file system, you will need to ensure that each node has a unique path to the log folder, or a unique log name. If multiple nodes write to the same log file, the process will be unable to roll over the log file and the log will grow forever, rather than starting a new file when it reaches 20 MB in size.

Also, please note that within each instance of ExtraView, each node must have a unique value set in the Configuration.properties file, for the parameter WEB_SERVER_NAME.

For multi-node installations where it is desired to construct a single .war file and deploy it to all nodes, you will need to use variable substitution in the Configuration.properties parameters, in order to have the necessary unique values, while having a single .war file to deploy.

In the evj/WEB-INF/configuration/Configuration.properties file, you will find the parameter

WEB_SERVER_NAME = WS_A

Replace the actual configuration settings with the name of your environment variable, surrounded by $$

WEB_SERVER_NAME = $$MANAGED_SERVER_NAME$$

Now, in your application server startup scripts for each managed server, set a -D option
-DMANAGED_SERVER_NAME to be the unique name of each node in the cluster.

Please see the section Protecting Configuration Settings for instructions on how to use environment variables within the Configuration.properties file for this purpose.