I have Apache Tomcat 7.0 installed on a Windows 2008 R2 Server. Tomcat has access to a share '\server\share' that has a documents folder that I want to access using '/foo/Documents' in my web application.

My application is able to access the documents when I set the file path to '//server/share/documents/doc1.doc'. I don't want the file server's path to be exposed on my link to the file in my application. I want to be able to set the path to '/foo/Documents/doc1.doc'.

In http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/ehchua/programming/howto/Tomcat_More.html under 'Setting the Context Root Directory and Request URL of a Webapp' item number two says that I can rename the path by putting in a context to the server.xml file. So I put

  <Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps"
        unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">

    <!-- SingleSignOn valve, share authentication between web applications
         Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html -->
    <!--
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.authenticator.SingleSignOn" />
    -->

    <!-- Access log processes all example.
         Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html
         Note: The pattern used is equivalent to using pattern="common" -->
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs"
           prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".txt"
           pattern="%h %l %u %t &quot;%r&quot; %s %b" />
    <Context path="/foo" docBase="//server/share" reloadable="false"></Context>
  </Host>

The context at the bottum was added. Then I tried to pull the file using '/foo/Documents/doc1.doc' and it didn't work. What do I need to do to get it to work correctly? Should I be using an alias instead? Are there other security issues that this may cause?