Webpshere v6.1 deployment hack

Whenever I wanted to change a single file on WAS server, I often used to copy that file to the 'installedApps' EAR directory of the application.

This used to work and though not mentioned in any IBM redbook; was considered as a hack by our team. But one day we ran into a problem which took us ages to decipher.

Whenever we changed the web.xml in WEB-INF, the changes were never reflected. For e.g. if we added a new struts-config entry to web.xml or a new filter, the configuration was never picked up.
We never really noticed this and thought the problem was with our struts-config file.
But the core issue was that WAS always picks up the web.xml file of an application from a different directory

-/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/
{profileName}/config/cells/{CellName}/applications/
{Application_EAR}/deployments/{Application_WAR}/WEB-INF

I changed the web.xml file here and all issues with struts-config were solved :)