Access to external files from the application context

[xela85]

Hello,

I would like to read an Excel file containing some useful data for my web application. To do it, I did that:

 File toRead = new File("data" + File.separator + "file.xlsx");

The file is in the data folder which is at the root of the project (not in app). It is correctly read after an activator dist, but seems to be excluded after a activator war command.

I have seen that it works if I add manually the data folder on Tomcat bin directory, but I find this quite ugly and would prefer having something self-contained. What if the server is not Tomcat?

Can you please point out what I did wrong?

Thanks in advance.

[yanns]

The war does not package the file in data. And even if the file is packaged in the war, unless you deploy the war as exploded, you cannot access it with File.

You have 3 solutions:

• put the file somewhere in the file system : in your application, you can access it with the absolute path. You could put the absolute path in the configuration.
• put your file in the conf folder and access it with getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("bla.xml"). You will have to change your application's code to use InputStream instead of File.
• put your file in the conf folder and deploy the war as exploded. Then you can access it as a File considering you can use a path relative to where the war is deployed.

[xela85]

I've tried the third option (exploded war) because I use an external library which requires java.io.File. It works, thank you !