i had similar problem when setting at runtime some options. I figured out those problem whit a custom VelocityBuilder and an external velocity.properties file where you can put all the runtime properties.
Here is the code:
public class BaseVelocityBuilder implements VelocityBuilder {
private VelocityEngine engine;
private Log logger = LogFactory.getLog(getClass());
@Autowired
private WebApplicationContext webApplicationContext;
public VelocityEngine engine() {
if(engine == null) {
engine = new VelocityEngine();
Properties properties = new Properties();
InputStream in = null;
try {
in = webApplicationContext.getServletContext().getResourceAsStream("/WEB-INF/velocity.properties");
properties.load(in);
engine.init(properties);
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
logger.error("Error loading velocity engine properties");
throw new ProgramException("Cannot load velocity engine properties");
}
IOUtils.closeQuietly(in);
}
return engine;
}
}
See this line:
in = webApplicationContext.getServletContext().getResourceAsStream("/WEB-INF/velocity.properties");
properties.load(in);
engine.init(properties);
So i have a velocity.properties file in /WEB-INF where i put some configuration:
resource.loader = webinf, class
webinf.resource.loader.description = Framework Templates Resource Loader
webinf.resource.loader.class = applica.framework.library.velocity.WEBINFResourceLoader
webapp.resource.loader.class = org.apache.velocity.tools.view.servlet.WebappLoader
webapp.resource.loader.path =
file.resource.loader.description = Velocity File Resource Loader
file.resource.loader.class = org.apache.velocity.runtime.resource.loader.FileResourceLoader
file.resource.loader.path =
class.resource.loader.description = Velocity Classpath Resource Loader
class.resource.loader.class = org.apache.velocity.runtime.resource.loader.ClasspathResourceLoader
runtime.log='/pathYouWant/velocity.log'
In the end in your application.xml :
<bean class="applica.framework.library.velocity.BaseVelocityBuilder" />
In this way you can have for example different file log for different application and when you give the war in production, the sysadm can change the properties due to env configuration of the production server.