monline

From the official documentation it might not be fully clear: for each webapp the server default context.xml is parsed first (which is at /etc/tomcat7/context.xml for Debian and Ubuntu servers) and if a webapp specific context definition exists (either at /META-INF/context.xml in the webapp's bundle/directory or at $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/ in a *.xml file), then the latter is "merged" with the global default. I.e. if the global default specifies a flag that the webapp's context definition does not, then the flag will be set as specified by the global default context config.