Hello Jetty developers,
My use case is the following. I have a Jetty server which hosts lots of different web applications. There is one common deployment descriptor webdefault.xml and each application has its own web.xml. In webdefault.xml there are some definitions of error
pages, e.g.:
<error-page>
<error-code>400</error-code>
<location>/error_400</location>
</error-page>
...
<error-page>
<error-code>500</error-code>
<location>/error_500</location>
</error-page>
...
The error pages are defined in webdefault.xml because I want the server to provide some default error handling to the hosted web applications. However, for a certain web application I want to change the default behaviour. For example for web application
"app1" I want to define a custom error page which handles error "401 Unauthorized".
If I try to define the custom error page in app1/WEB-INF/web.xml, Jetty throws an exception during the deployment of "app1". The message is "Duplicate global error-page". However if I define the custom error page in an override-web.xml for "app1", there
is no error and the new error page is applied.
My question is whether this behaviour is intended or not? Shouldn't web.xml override the contents of webdefault.xml? A web application can have a list of overriding descriptors which are applied one after another. Shouldn't web.xml be treated just like
the first descriptor in this list?
I found that the exception is thrown in the code which processes the deployment descriptor (web.xml):
StandardDescriptorProcessor.java:1200 (from tag jetty-9.3.0.M1):
throw new IllegalStateException("Duplicate global error-page "+location);
If you agree that <error-page> entries in web.xml should override such entries in webdefault.xml, I can report a new Jetty bug and provide a fix which fixes this part of StandardDescriptorProcessor.visitErrorPage().
Regards,
Miroslav Todorov,
My webMethods Server developer,
Software AG
