How to get and set a global object in Java servlet context

Question

I wonder if anyone can advise: I have a scenario where a scheduled job being run by Quartz will update an arraylist of objects every hour.

But I need this arraylist of objects to be visible to all sessions created by Tomcat. So what I'm thinking is that I write this object somewhere every hour from the Quartz job that runs so that each session can access it.

Can anyone say how best this may be achieved? I was wondering about the object being written to servlet context from the Quartz job? The alternative is having each session populate the arraylist of objects from a database table.

Thanks

Mr Morgan.

Answer 1

Yes, I would store the list in the ServletContext as an application-scoped attribute. Pulling the data from a database instead is probably less efficient, since you're only updating the list every hour. Creating a ServletContextListener might be necessary in order to give the Quartz task a reference to the ServletContext object. The ServletContext can only be retrieved from JavaEE-related classes like Servlets and Listeners.

EDIT: In the ServletContextListener, when you create the job, you can pass the list into the job by adding it to a JobDataMap.

public class MyServletContextListener implements ServletContextListener{
  public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event){
    ArrayList list = new ArrayList();

    //add to ServletContext
    event.getServletContext().setAttribute("list", list);

    JobDataMap map = new JobDataMap();
    map.put("list", list);
    JobDetail job = new JobDetail(..., MyJob.class);
    job.setJobDataMap(map);
    //execute job
  }

  public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event){}
}

//Quartz job
public class MyJob implements Job{
  public void execute(JobExecutionContext context){
    ArrayList list = (ArrayList)context.getMergedJobDataMap().get("list");
    //...
  }
}