Chris
>> BTW, why doesn't getRealPath return the full path to the
>> folder that the WAR file is in instead of null?
>
> You mean for a call like getRealPath("/")?
Yes, exactly!
> Well, that would require a path to be returned to the "root" of
> the application. Let's say that ROOT.war is in
> /home/tomcat/webapps/ROOT.war and also index.html is in the
> "root" of the WAR File.
>
> If you used getRealPath("/index.html") it would, as described,
> return null -- because there's no file path that could get you
> to that file.
>
> If you used getRealPath("/") and then added "/index.html" to
> the end of it, you'd expect to be able to read index.html from
> the resulting path (/home/tomcat/webapps/index.html). Not only
> does that not work (because the file isn't there), it's not
> even the right path. The "right" path (if there even is one)
> would be something like "/home/tomcat/webapps/ROOT.war/index.html".
While that is exactly the sort of result I would want, it does seem kind of
hackish. It isn't a response that can be supplied to a file system to retrieve
the file. It would require some sort of analysis and parsing. So I can see
why null is the safer answer, even if I don't like it. ;-)
> So when the WAR is not unpacked, there really isn't any
> meaningful return value from getRealPath, even for special-
> cases like "" or "/".
Thanks for explaining. I need to absorb all that info.
Also, maybe I'm not asking the right question. How do you all configure the
location of a special folder that is not part of the deployment package itself?
A site-specific config file perhaps? Currently I'm using getRealPath for a
relative-path location, but it sounds like that may need to be changed.
Fortunately, the impact points are somewhat limited since all calls to
getRealPath are wrapped with other centralized methods.
--
Cris Berneburg
CACI Lead Software Engineer
