Question

I have created dynamic web project. In that I have written one Java class which opens a properties file and returns the value for a key passed to the function.

But to open the properties file I have to write a whole path like c:/Apache/webapps/webcontent/resources/system.properties. But I want to calculate the real path of this file using a relative path.

How to calculate the real path? This is not a servlet, it’s a complete Java file having only one class and its methods. How do I calculate the real path of a file?

Answer 1

If you load a File with a relative path, calling File.getCanonicalPath() or File.getAbsolutePath() will give you the absolute path.

When using an app server, your working directory will be where your app server was started from, so to get the absolute path to a File using a relative path, you would need to do:

String relativePath = '/mypath/myfile.txt';
String absolutePath = getServletContext().getRealPath(relativePath);
File file = new File(absolutePath);