RE: Package cannot find a file...

> From: Joel R. Cochran
>
> I have no trouble getting my servlets to use classes in my
> packages, but one
> of the classes is giving me fits.  In one of the packages, I have a class
> that reads a text file and outputs the text, line by line, to a web page.
> The problem is that no matter where I put the text file the class throws
> this exception:  "FileNotFoundException:No such path or directory".
>
> I do this in a stand alone Swing application with no trouble.  In
> that case,
> you must put the text file in the same directory as the class
> that calls the
> package.  In this case that would be the "classes" directory.
>
> I have placed the file in myApp, WEB-INF, classes, and the package
> directory, but it is never found.
>
> I have tried accessing it using filename, /filename, myApp/filename, and
> /myApp/filename.

Try the ServerRoot directive in the http.conf file in your Apache setup (in
the IFS in folder QIBM/HTTPA/conf).  That usually does the trick.  For
standalone Tomcat, it's a little different.

If you can't wade through the configuration files, you can use the File
class to empirically determine what your root directory is.  Just run the
following code in a servlet:

        String[] files = { "file", "/slashfile", "./dotfile", "/./slashdotfile" 
};

        out.println("<H4>File paths</H4>");

        out.println("<table border=4>");
        out.println("
<tr><th>AbsoluteFile</th><th>AbsolutePath</th><th>CanonicalFile</th><th>Cano
nicalPath</th></tr>");

        try {
                for (int i = 0; i < files.length; i++)
                {
                        File file = new File(files[i]);
                        out.println("  <tr><td>" +
                                file.getAbsoluteFile() + "</td><td>" +
                                file.getAbsolutePath() + "</td><td>" +
                                file.getCanonicalFile() + "</td><td>" +
                                file.getCanonicalPath() + "</td></tr>");
                }
        } catch (Exception e1) {}

        out.println("</table>");

It will print out a table of the paths and files for various syntaxes of
file prefixes.

Joe