<param-value> tag in web.xml

[Amirtharaj Chinnaraj]

Hi All,

Iam working in a maintenance project. Their i found the following servlet tag in the web.xml, In the servlet tag is mentioned as below

<servlet> <servlet-name>action</servlet-name> <servlet-class> com.struts.action.TestActionServlet </servlet-class> [b]<init-param> <param-name>config</param-name> <param-value>.*[\\/]struts-config.*.xml$</param-value> </init-param>[/b] <load-on-startup>50</load-on-startup> </servlet>

here iam not able to understand what the <param-value>.*[\\/]struts-config.*.xml$</param-value>
</init-param>represents. is it a regular Expression, if so then any please explain how this expression works

so to understand how it behaves i tried to build a small web-application using Tomcat 7 , iam getting FIleNotFoundException

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

com.struts.action.TestActionServlet looks like a servlet someone at your company wrote. Check the source code for what it does. It's not a good package name for what it is worth unless you work for a company called Struts.

You are correct that the value is a regular expression. Diagramming it, we have:
.* - zero or more of any characters
[\\/] - slash or backslash
struts-config.*.xml - wildcard for files beginning with struts config that are xml
$ - end of string

In other words, it finds struts config files with anything extra in the name like struts-config.qa.xml