Question

I am running eclipse on a mac and have my tomcat folder at /Library/WebServer/apache-tomcat.
I am using the tomcat 7 server from within eclipse and configured it to use the original tomcat folder as its working directory.

Problem is that when using the PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer bean in Spring 3.1 and specify the location as “classpath:database.properties”, when i start tomcat it will always give me a FileNotFoundException.

I have tried placing the database.properties file in lib,conf and root folder of the tomcat folder.

I am out of options, please help!

EDIT 1

Tried Guido Simone’s solution, but i get:

ERROR: org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader - Context initialization failed
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanInitializationException: Could not load properties; nested exception is java.io.FileNotFoundException: /Library/WebServer/apache-tomcat-7.0.32/conf/database.properties (No such file or directory)

So i finally see the full path that spring is looking for the file(which is correct) and the file is physically there. Any other suggestions? And if this is going to work, do other webservers have this catalina.base variable also or is this tomcat specific? Because i kind of need platform independence at a later stage.

Answer 1

I tend to not use the classpath URL for just this reason. I hate having to keep track of exactly how the classpath is configured for various runtime environments. For property files that are likely to be edited (and cannot go into the WAR file) I would recommend something like:

  <bean id="propertyPlaceholderConfigurer"
    class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
    <property name="location" value="file:${catalina.base}/conf/database.properties"/>

Now, it’s clear that the file is in the conf folder, with all the other configuration stuff.

[update]

catalina.base is definitely Tomcat specific, so the exact XML above would not be portable to other application servers. If you decide to continue with the file: prefix, you would need to do a bit more work and define your own system property to indicate where all your configuration files are ( file:${my.product.conf}/database.properties)

You would need to check the documentation for each app server to figure out how to set this property at startup.

No idea why your are still getting the FileNotFoundException now that the full, absolute path is spelled out. The only thing I can think of is perhaps the file is not really where you think it is 🙂 🙂 🙂 Sorry.