Question

I have a web app and I need to get absolute path of a folder (in my case, WEB-INF) in a static block of a class which is not a servlet. Of course, I could take this value from properties file but can I do this otherwise?

Answer 1

You can use the getRealPath() method of the ServletContext ServletContext.getRealPath to find out the actual folder in your filesystem like

String realPathOfImgFolder=req.getServletContext().getRealPath("/foldername");

You may not get the WEB-INF folder name like this because it is not in the servlet context’s exposed directories, you may have to do something like this for it

String rootPath=req.getServletContext().getRealPath("/");
File webInfFolder=new File(rootPath,"WEB-INF");

[EDIT] If you dont have the request object, then you will have to use a ServletContextListener and use its contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) method to grab the ServletContext and store the path into the application scope for retrieving it later.