Context in server

Hi all!

Since a while I'm trying to convice the Tomcat to do, what I want to do, but I don't manage it. May be you can help.

I want to have a context.xml for my web application. This context should reside in the server itself, not in the web application. Because: I want to define <Parameter>'s which depend on the server. For instance the mail server should be configured here. On the production server there should be a different mail server than on the test server. And I want to deploy the same war-file on both production and test, and each should use it's mail server. Therefore META-INF/context.xml is not an option.

Then I'll try to use conf/Catalina/localhost/myapp.xml. When I start up the server everything is fine. My webapp can see the <Parameter>'s. But when I upload a new war-file of my application using Lambda Probe, the file myapp.xml is deleted! And of course the application does not find its parameters.

If I try to upload the new war-file with the tomcat manager, I have to undeploy the old application first. If I do this, my myapp.xml is gone as well.

When I put the Context element into the server.xml, I cannot upload any war-file, because the application exists already - even if I tag "Update application, if already exists" in Lambda Probe.

Up to now, I do workaround by putting my <Parameter>'s into conf/context.xml. Then my <Parameter>'s are available in other web apps as well. This is not nice, but not a show stopper. But I want to define a <Manager pathname="/some/absolute/path"> as well. And then this is applied to all webapps, which means they overwrite each others session file when stopping the server.

I think, that what I want is not that exotic. So I think, there must be a solution. Probably I'm doing something completely wrong, but what?

Can anyone help me?

Best regards,
Ralf.