Perhaps I phrased this wrong. I'm referring to a context to denote two different processes on one server. Neither application is set up as a WAR file. The entirely of the suite is, in fact, exploded into a common file hierarchy. I know this is not the way Tomcat is expected to be used. The problem lies in the fact that I have one very large web suite which was designed by a former employee who sort of knew how to work with JSP and Tomcat. At the point after he left, I inherited his entire code base. We were then given another application/nested directory, which ran independently on one server in a different call center for the same company. This got installed as a sub-folder of our web root,. If we were to call the original suite Nostromo, we access <WEBROOT>/index.jsp by going to
http://nostromo. Another call center in this company developed the application Sulaco, which is on their Tomcat install and accessed at
http://sulaco. However, I was told we needed to have Sulaco work in my center, so what would be the root got installed at <WEBROOT>/sulaco. Now, we can access it through
http://nostromo/sulaco, but get different session IDs. To my way of thinking (and if I'm misunderstanding, please correct me), the Tomcat server should see someone logged in to
http://nostromo, then said person clicking on a link from the main page for
http://nostromo/sulaco would qualify as accessing a page within the same context. Is this wrong? I understood it to be similar to me creating a sub-directory called <WEBROOT>/rotovator, with page rotovator/index.jsp, at which point I would expect that rotovator/index.jsp would pull the same session ID from the browser as nostromo/index.jsp would, since they're in the same context path. In fact, that's exactly how I have this set up, and both suites work together in all other aspects which I've had a chance to test, except session ID.
Is it possible I've just not found some definition (analogous to a symbolic link) in a conf file somewhere that tells Tomcat to treat /nostromo/sulaco as a separate context?