Spring 4 - Java Config, Tomcat, and Display Name

Question

I'm using Spring 4.1.1 with pure Java Config (i.e., no web.xml at all). The AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext has a displayName property, which I assume is analogous to the display-name tag in a web.xml file. However, when I set this property in Java Config, the "Display Name" column in the Tomcat Manager is empty when I deploy the WAR unlike if I would have used the display-name tag in web.xml.

Is this the intended behavior or am I doing something wrong. I'm using the latest version of Tomcat which is 7.0.57, Java 1.7 u51, and Groovy 2.3.7.

@Slf4j
class WebAppInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {
{
    @Override
    void onStartup(ServletContext container) throws ServletException {
        def rootContext = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext()
        rootContext.register(WebAppConfig)
        rootContext.servletContext = container
        rootContext.displayName = 'Description of WAR goes here!'

        DispatcherServlet dispatcherServlet = new DispatcherServlet(rootContext)
        dispatcherServlet.throwExceptionIfNoHandlerFound = true

        def dispatcherServletReg = container.addServlet('dispatcher', dispatcherServlet)
        dispatcherServletReg.addMapping('/')
        dispatcherServletReg.loadOnStartup = 1
    }
}

Thanks ahead of time for any help.

Answer 1

Well as you are seeing the displayName being set is just for the Spring ApplicationContext and isn't at all related to the web.xml display-name. The web.xml display-name aligns with: container.getServletContextName();

Since this object is already passed in with its value set and the ServletContext interface doesn't allow you to change this value I'm not sure its possible with a purely java configuration.

You can however still use a partial web.xml in conjunction with the WebApplicationInitializer by setting metadata-complete="false":

<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
metadata-complete="false" version="3.0">
    <display-name>Web Application Name</display-name>
</web-app>