Question

I’m having a small problem decoupling the path specification for properties files that my JAVA program uses , from the implementation itself.
The program may be deployed at multiple locations with different directory structures and I don’t want the path specification to be hard coded into the Program code.

Here is the situation as it exists now.

I have one folder server/
Inside which there are 2 packages core/ & support/ (both of which have many subpackages underneath)

What I had done earlier was that , wherever the path for a properties file needed to be specified , I just gave a relative path i.e. properties/
In this scenario, the properties file needs to be wherever you’re launching the program from. This worked during testing , when i was manually starting the program up using
“java “. and i would put the properties folder wherever I was starting the program from.
But in a real scenario, this program will be autostarted by a script (ksh) which is executed at scheduled intervals by a job.

In this case , giving the relative path doesn’t work. I tried putting the properties files in the folder where the scripts are located , but that doesn’t work either.

Right now , I am having to manually specify the path for each environment recompile the code and deploy a separate copy for each environment.
Is there any way to remove this coupling and just have one location for the properties file regardless of where it needs to be deployed?

Answer 1

use a System.Properties entry to specify the path, then on command line add it via

java -DmyProp=somepath -cp yourclasspath YourClass

In your app, you can retrieve it with System.getProperty("myProp"), just be sure to add proper testing and handle the Property Not Found scenario.

Another practice is to leave props in a jar and then load ’em with the LoadResource, in this way you just need to deploy different config jars in each deployment, but I think that the System.setProperty way is the fastest.