[THREDDS #IZW-298295]: Customise TDS [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Hello Ken,

Thanks for writing in with questions.  If the answers I've interspersed below 
don't help, please follow up.

Thanks,
  Lansing Madry
  Unidata
  Boulder, Colorado

> Hi Support,
> 
> I name is Ken Toch and I am working for Bureau Meteorology in
> system. Recently I have managed to get TDS (thredds) up and running on
> our server. There are two questions I need to ask and I hope you can
> help me to customise the way thredds were setup.
> 
> 1. Because this is government website and the major concern is
> security. To get thredds running I have to deploy war file under
> tomcat/webapps (/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/) this directory owns by
> root (the people who is looking after the web security). Anyway
> I have managed to deploy thredds outside of tomcat/webapps, which
> is /web/webapps/ (this directory I have access to) but I got HTTP
> status 404 - /thredds/catalog.html. This I believed (I could be
> wrong but may be you can help me) may be I didn't create symlink
> under /usr/share/tomcat6/content to /var/lib/tomcat6/content/ (these
> two directories owns by root). Okay here is my question why thredds
> need these two directories and is there a way to customise thredds
> to look for other dir like /web/webapps etc. If so, could you please
> instruct me?
> 
I'm not exactly sure what you are getting at with your question, here.  Did you 
really mean to ask whether Tomcat can be configured to look in a directory 
other than ${tomcat_home}/webapps/ for a warfile or a deployed web application? 
 While it is not something that I have done, I think you should look at the 
appBase attribute, as described here in the Tomcat 7 documentation:

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/host.html

As far as I know, you can direct THREDDS to look for data files in almost any 
directory on the filesystem by pointing the 
${tomcat_home}/content/thredds/catalog.xml file in the correct direction.
> 2. I have mentioned that I have successfully deployed
> thredds under tomcat/webapps now next step is to make
> http://localhost:8080/thredds/catalog.html look and feel to our webpage
> (it is government policy). I believed, the bit that display the catalog
> page is
> 
> /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/thredds/WEBINF/jsp/thredds/server/catalog/catalog.jsp
> 
> I have made some changes on catalog.jsp re-run tomcat and redeploy
> thredds but I didn't see the effect on /thredds/catalog.html page.
> 
> What did I go wrong?
> 
> How can I customise catalog.html to include standard header/css etc?
> 
Take a look in the tutorial at the documentation on THREDDS configuration:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/tech/tds4.3/tutorial/Basic-threddsConfig_xml.html

Near the bottom of this section is a bit on the appearance of generated HTML 
pages.  Let me know if it does not help.
> Many thanks advance for your helps.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ken Toch
> 
> 

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: IZW-298295
Department: Support THREDDS
Priority: High
Status: Open