Avoid Overwriting Custom Pages during Upgrades

The ENOVIA Live Collaboration Server contains a filter class that allows requests from ENOVIA products to check for a prefixed file name, so that you can store custom resources (JSP, HTML, and image files) with alternate file names to prevent them from being overwritten on subsequent application installations. It is possible to define multiple prefixes for file names. This allows you to keep various customization, accelerator, or integration files easy to identify.

Related Topics
In Other Guides
Enabling the Custom JSP Filter
How the Installation Manages Previous Versions
Using a Custom Directory for Custom JSP Pages

Note: You can implement a custom directory to store custom files. However, when using custom directories, there are certain JSP directives that will result in run-time (vs. compile-time) errors if the relative pathing is not correct. Therefore, it is recommended to use custom prefixes instead of a custom directory. In version 10.7 and later, use of a custom directory is not supported by default—configuration in the relevant web.xml.part fragment is required.

The naming convention prefixes are contained in the web.xml.part fragment for the application server. If the custom JSP filter is enabled, the filter first looks for a page having a name that is the concatenation of any of the defined prefixes and that of the requested file. If no prefix is set or the page is not found, it looks for the originally requested page.

For example, the filter first looks for an Engineering Central file with all specified prefixes under the engineeringcentral\ directory. If it does not find one, it looks for the originally requested file name in engineeringcentral\.

Implementing the custom JSP filter involves simple changes to the relevant web.xml.part fragment for your application server's WAR file.