I know this question has answered many a time with most useful answer as below,
Where to place and how to read configuration resource files in servlet based applicat
You can add a to tomcat/conf/server.xml (in this example, linux path):
If you are using Windows:
And then you can access it like any other resource within your webapp (e.g.: /assets/myappConfig.property).
If you are using JDBC for example, you could store the connection properties in a Singleton and request it from there, and that class could take care of change checks on that file.