Question

I have a Java project with a toolbar, and the toolbar has icons on it. These icons are stored in a folder called resources/, so for example the path might be “resources/icon1.png”. This folder is located in my src directory, so when it is compiled the folder is copied into bin/

I’m using the following code to access the resources.

    protected AbstractButton makeToolbarButton(String imageName, String actionCommand, String toolTipText,
        String altText, boolean toggleButton) {

    String imgLocation = imageName;
    InputStream imageStream = getClass().getResourceAsStream(imgLocation);

    AbstractButton button;
    if (toggleButton)
        button = new JToggleButton();
    else
        button = new JButton();

    button.setActionCommand(actionCommand);
    button.setToolTipText(toolTipText);
    button.addActionListener(listenerClass);

    if (imageStream != null) { // image found
        try {
            byte abyte0[] = new byte[imageStream.available()];
            imageStream.read(abyte0);

            (button).setIcon(new ImageIcon(Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage(abyte0)));

        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } finally {
            try {
                imageStream.close();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    } else { // no image found
        (button).setText(altText);
        System.err.println("Resource not found: " + imgLocation);
    }

    return button;
}

(imageName will be “resources/icon1.png” etc). This works fine when run in Eclipse. However, when I export a runnable JAR from Eclipse, the icons are not found.

I opened the JAR file and the resources folder is there. I’ve tried everything, moving the folder, altering the JAR file etc, but I cannot get the icons to show up.

Does anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

(As a side question, is there any file monitor that can work with JAR files? When path problems arise I usually just open FileMon to see what’s going on, but it just shows up as accessing the JAR file in this case)

Thank you.

Answer 1

To load an image from a JAR resource use the following code:

Toolkit tk = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();
URL url = getClass().getResource("path/to/img.png");
Image img = tk.createImage(url);
tk.prepareImage(img, -1, -1, null);