Can your webapps see GenericPrincipal? Looking at the JavaDocs for the Catalina api, it looks like the session façade your get app gets is going to have access to a java.security.Principal (likely also a façade), not a GenericPrincipal. Maybe instead of extending a class in the server/Catalina classloader, you could implement another subclass of java.security.Principal, and have that class loaded in the common classloader.
Benjamin J. Armintor Systems Analyst ITS-Systems: Mainframe Group University of Texas - Austin tele: (512) 232-6562 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: John H [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 11:25 AM To: Tomcat Users List Subject: Extending GenericPrincipal/RealmBase: Essentially a classloader question HI all, He have implemented our own realm and principal buy extending org.apache.catalina.realm.RealmBase and GenericPrincipal. (Using TC5.0.19 on Solaris and Windows. Realm defined in <Context>.) By doing this, however, we've got ourselves into sort of a catch 22 in terms of classloading. Hopefully someone can offer some assistance. I've referenced the Class Loader HOW-TO at http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.0-doc/class-loader-howto.html, so I'll use it's terminology. RealmBase and GenericPrincipal are located in catalina.jar, which resides physically in server/lib. The howo defines this jar as in the Catalina class loader. The definition says that the Catalina classes are totally invisible to web applications, which seems true enough. In order to extend these, I must locate my jar in server/lib. So far so good. The problem is that I need to use my extension of GenericPrincipal within my webapps. I tried moving my jar to common/lib, since, according to the parent tree in the howto, it is visible to both the Catalina branch and the webapp branch. Doing this causes a NoClassDefFoundError for GenericPrincipal. Apparently since the Catalina classloader is below the common classloader, it can't find GenericPrincipal. The only solution that appears to work is moving the entire contents of server/lib to common/lib, essentially 'promoting' all of the classes normally in the Catalina class loader to the common class loader. Is this the best solution? It seems to me that I should be able to extend RealmBase/GenericPrincipal without having to move jars around. Any ideas? John --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
