I am running a Java J2EE app in Tomcat and I would like to upload some files that can be directly served by Tomcat via URL (ie, I don't want to create an additional servlet to serve the files).
What is the best way? I know I should not create files inside the deployed WAR directory (if it is extracted at all), as illustrated in this very old post. By the way, this doesn't seem to work in the embedded Tomcat of Netbeans, because it uses a different directory.
I tried creating another directory under "webapps":
System.getProperty("catalina.base") + "/webapps/uploadedFiles/";
but Tomcat does not seem to serve any file at "localhost:8080/uploadedFiles/...". So I had to put the files inside the webapps/ROOT directory, were they could be accessed. However, this looks ugly and it's probably not really correct, there should be a more "standard" way.
My question is:
HOW CAN I MAKE TOMCAT SERVE my upload files, considering that they cannot be placed in the deployed directory because they can be overwritten?
Or, what is the same: where should I place my upload files so Tomcat can serve them directly via HTTP request?