Question

I a folder structure like so:

src\java\com\company\resources\xmlFile.xml

The xml file is in the package com.company.resources. I’m using netbeans, so here is a picture of the structure:

I am trying pass the address of the xml file as a string to this static method found in another jar:

public static String createXMLStringFromDocument(String fileName){
    try {
        DocumentBuilderFactory documentBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory
                .newInstance();
        InputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(new File(fileName));
        org.w3c.dom.Document doc = documentBuilderFactory
                .newDocumentBuilder().parse(inputStream);
        StringWriter stw = new StringWriter();
        Transformer serializer = TransformerFactory.newInstance()
                .newTransformer();
        serializer.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(stw));
        return stw.toString();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        return e.toString();
    }
}

What should be passed in?

This works as expected in another project, run in Eclipse, where I have left the xml file at the ROOT of the project. I pass in the file name, “xmlFile.xml”, and it works. However I can’t seem to get this to work in netbeans. I get a file not found with all the addresses I’ve tried:

“src/java/com/company/resources/xmlFile.xml” etc.

What am I missing here.

Answer 1

Since your xml is on the classpath, you don’t need the full path to it (as it may be hard or impossible to get if the file is in a .jar file). You just need to get a stream to it. Use:

 InputStream is = YourClass.getResourceAsStream("/com/company/resources/xmlFile.xml");