Question

I have a bean which im trying to pass a relative path at web application startup. It works for an absolute path (running tomcat within eclipse) such as (C:/dev/workspace/project/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/resource/)

However when I try to pass it a relative path such as WEB-INF/my_resource/ it says cannot find the location C:/dev/eclipse/WEB-INF/my_resource/ probably because tomcat is running within eclipse. How can I make this path relative so that it will be always picked up from whatever webcontainer is running it no matter the location of the webapp?

Ive read in place to use the servletconfig.getRelativePath(/) but neither know how to obtain the servlet config from within my bean or even if this is the right thing to do in Spring… Please help

The source code for my bean class and bean configuration xml can be found below

public class SuggestionIndexSearcher extends IndexSearcher {

private String indexSearcherType;

public SuggestionIndexSearcher(String type, String path){
    super(path);
    this.indexSearcherType = type;
}
...
}

The bean is defined in teh beans xml as…

    <bean id="KMSearcherBean" class="com.hp.it.km.search.web.suggestion.SuggestionIndexSearcher">
      <constructor-arg index="0" value="KMSearcher" />
      <constructor-arg index="1" value="WEB-INF/resource/keyword" />
</bean>

Answer 1

If your change your bean to take org.springframework.core.io.Resource (javadoc) instead of String, then Spring will automagically coerce your path into the appropriate type of Resource. When running inside a servlet container, Spring will generally pick ServletContextResource, in which the path becomes relative to the webapp root (so WEB-INF/my_resource/ should work as you expect).

How your code chooses to handle Resource depends what you want to do with it, obviously.

No change is required in your XML config, just keep passing the path string as before. See the Spring manual for a wider description of resources.