On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Randy Layman wrote:
>
> The one major problem with what you ask is: What happens if the
> application is run out of a WAR file? As in, the JSP server does not expand
> the WAR to run it? This is a possiblity according to the spec, although I
> don't know of any JSP environment that works in this way.
>
FYI, Tomcat 4.0 can do this if you tell it to.
> To set an Application's default directory, use
> System.setProperty("USER.DIR", "Path Here"). Be warned, however, that this
> will affect the default directory for every class that is running in the
> JVM, including Tomcat and any other webapps. You probably don't want to do
> this.
>
If your server is running under a security manager, you might not be
allowed to do this anyway.
> You can use ServletContext.getRealPath("relative path") to get the
> address of some file in your webapp and then somehow mangle this if you need
> to write files that don't yet exist. Be careful, though, because this might
> the be address to a file inside of a WAR file.
>
There is no such thing as the "pathname" to an element inside the WAR
file. In such a case, ServletContext.getRealPath() will return null.
> If you only need to read files, you could use
> ClassLoader.getResource/getResourceAsStream or
> ServletContext.getResource/getResourceAsStream. These methods find a file
> relative to your classpath (for ClassLoader) or webapp root (for
> ServletContext). These methods only work for reading files that already
> exist.
>
> Another option is to store the path in a configuration file, like
> web.xml. Accessing this depends on how you set it up. A side not here,
> though, Tomcat only loads the web.xml file at the context load time (start
> in Tomcat 3, context load in Tomcat 4). This means that you will have to
> force the Tomcat configuration to be loaded if you change the path.
>
Such forcing is possible through the Admin application (Tomcat 3) or the
manager webapp (Tomcat 4).
> The last option that I can think of right now is to hard code the
> path into your application. This can either be relative to the startup
> directory (TOMCAT_HOME/bin) or an absolute path. Both have downsides,
> relative to /bin makes you at the mercy of other applications that choose to
> mess with the USER.DIR propery (see first option) and the absolute path is
> almost always a bad idea.
>
> Randy
>
Craig McClanahan
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