Porting a servlet to a web service - accessing the context?

Question

Consider a simply servlet:

// MyServlet.java
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
{
    UtilClass.doSomething(getServletContext().getRealPath(SOME_FILE));
}

And the utility class does something with the file:

// UtilClass.java
public String doSomething(String filePath)
{
    File f = new File(filePath);
    String s = readWhateverFrom(f);
    return s;
}

I am now porting the doSomething() function to a web service running under Tomcat and Axis2. How would I port it so that I can still access the context and get access to a file under the servlet?

Answer 1

Sounds like a job for a Servlet Filter and a ThreadLocal. Axis is running within a Servlet Context, too. So all you have to do is to implement a custom javax.servlet.Filter, stuffing in the ServletRequest into a ThreadLocal where you can access it from within your utility class. You can get the ServletContext from the FilterConfig.

Answer 2

You should get ahold of your (jax-ws) MessageContext. This would depend on your configuration, but perhaps using

@Resource
private WebServiceContext wsCtx;

and in your method:

MessageContext messageContext = wsCtx.getMessageContext()

ServletContext ctx = (ServletContext) 
           messageContext.getProperty(MessageContext.SERVLET_CONTEXT);

Edit: Seems like Axis2 (as well as Axis) support the following:

HttpServlet servlet = (HttpServlet) 
    MessageContext.getCurrentContext().getProperty(HTTPConstants.MC_HTTP_SERVLET);
ServletContext ctx = servlet.getServletContext();

With the following imports:

import org.apache.axis2.context.MessageContext;
import org.apache.axis2.transport.http.HTTPConstants;