The Tomcat 4 Servlet/JSP Container

MBean Descriptor How To

Tomcat 4 uses JMX MBeans as the technology for implementing manageability of Tomcat.

The descriptions of JMX MBeans for Catalina are in the org.apache.catalina.mbeans.mbeans-descriptor.xml file.

You will need to add MBean descriptions for your custom components in order to avoid a "ManagedBean is not found" exception.

Including your own mbean-descriptor files

You may configure custom components (e.g. Valves/Realms) by including your own mbean-descriptor file(s), and setting the "descriptors" attribute to point to a ';' separated list of paths (in the ClassLoader sense) of files to add to the default list under ServerLifecycleListener definition in server.xml.
<Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener"
          debug="0"
          descriptors="/com/myfirm/mypackage/mbean-descriptor.xml"/>

Adding MBean description to Catalina's mbean-descriptors.xml

You may also add MBean descriptions for custom components in org.apache.catalina.mbeans.mbeans-descriptor.xml file.

  <mbean         name="LDAPRealm"
            className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ClassNameMBean"
          description="Custom LDAPRealm"
               domain="Catalina"
                group="Realm"
                 type="com.myfirm.mypackage.LDAPRealm">

    <attribute   name="className"
          description="Fully qualified class name of the managed object"
                 type="java.lang.String"
            writeable="false"/>

    <attribute   name="debug"
          description="The debugging detail level for this component"
                 type="int"/>
    .
    .
    .

  </mbean>