Question

I am creating a Java app for some serial port communication and within the app’s folder I have two resources that need to be present at run-time. The first is an image that is being used as a splash screen and the other is a configuration file that needs to be read as the program starts.

Here is an abridged version of the output from the “tree” command in Linux, the two files that I need to be referencing are “commandSet.config” and “splash-screen2.png”

.
├── bin
│   ├──...
├── commandSet.config
├── app-manifest.txt
├── splash-screen2.png
└── src
    ├── events
    │   └── InterfaceEvents.java
    ├── models
    │   ├── Command.java
    │   └── Phone.java
    ├── operations
    │   ├── Application.java
    │   ├── ...
    └── views
        ├── CallDialog.java
        ├── SplashScreen.java
        └── Window.java

I am currently referencing in the following lines:

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("commandSet.config"));

and

JLabel image = new JLabel(new ImageIcon("splash-screen2.png"));

This works fine when I am running it from Eclipse, but as soon as I export to a runnable JAR the files are not moved and therefore aren’t correctly referenced. I have tried moving them into the “src” folder, which resulted in them being archived within the JAR, but I still couldn’t reference them.

I’m pretty new to the concept of exporting Java projects, so maybe I have missed something obvious. If someone could show me the best way to do this and the best approach for future project file systems, I would be very grateful. Cheers!

Answer 1

Ok, I mananged to crack this and thought I’d drop an answer for others in the future. I basically followed “duffymo’s” guidelines, here’s what I did:

• Created a JAR with my resources in.
• Put that JAR in the root of the project.
• Used Eclipse to add that JAR to the build path.
• Used getResourceAsStream(“/nameOfFile.ext“) to get the streams for my resources.

Cheers!