Configuring dfc.properties for an application archive

When you obtain a new application server archive such as war file or ear file and that application archive contains a copy of DFC you are often faced with the task of configuring the dfc.properties file for the archive before it can be used. One common technique for doing this is to insert a dfc.properties file of your choice into the archive. For an ear file you can place your dfc.properties into the /APP-INF/classes directory of the archive. For a war file you can place your dfc.properties into the /WEB-INF/classes directory of the archive. This task can be accomplished using the jar utility from the JDK or using a zip utility such as Winzip.

For production environments that is often a good way to go. For development environments, however, constantly updating the archive each time you get a new version can be tedious. Another approach is to use a system property. If you set the “dfc.properties.file” system property then DFC will use that value to locate dfc.properties. For example:

java –Ddfc.properties.file=C:/Documentum/config/dfc.properties …

You can set this system property in a number of ways. If you are using an IDE to launch the application server you can generally set the system property in the “run” configuration screen of your IDE.

If you are starting your application server from a script you can modify the startup script to include the system property definition. In the case of Tomcat, you can also set the system property in an environment variable. For example:

set JAVA_OPTS=–Ddfc.properties.file=C:/Documentum/config/dfc.properties

Use the system property to select your dfc.properties externalizes the configuration from the application archive and allow you to easily switch between different versions of the archive without the need to configure each.