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No, no this isn’t another DBFS post but a more simple and direct way of achieving the same

😉

Just had a funny discussion with Roel Hartman regarding how to trick the Tomcat APEX 4 setup in believing that the virtual XFILES directory in the database was actually available on disk of the local server. This is probably not the way to solve this but should be realized via Tomcat / APEX 4. The OTN Development virtualbox environment with APEX 4 gets his “/i/” images via Tomcat from the directory.

[oracle@localhost i]$ pwd
/home/oracle/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/webapps/ROOT/i

The easiest solution would have been to copy the XFILES images and files in a directory called XFILES under the ROOT directory.

[oracle@localhost i]$ pwd
/home/oracle/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/webapps/ROOT/XFILES

Investigating the APEX 3 and 4 OTN Development virtualbox environments, I discovered the following way to solve it as well, which in this case was implemented by Mark Drake.

What you could do in this situation, while keeping it “as is”, so XFILES files and images in the database are still in the XDB Repository, is to “trick” the Tomcat server so the virtual directory could be accessed via WebDAV as if it were a file system mount. There is an open source project out there called “davfs”, which is nowadays a GNU Project, and can be found here for download (“davfs2”) which could achieve this for us.

As it is said there: