Question

I’m looking for the best way to use an external properties file with an application that is going to be deployed on Weblogic 10.3 server. I read a number of articles on the site but I don’t want to hard-code the path to the properties file or put the file in the domains/mydomain folder.

Is there a dynamic way of doing this so when the application is deployed the properties file is also installed for example under the deployments folder and read from there?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Another alternative that does not require putting the file in a place other applications will read it is to use the Generic File Loading Overrides:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/web.1111/e13702/config.htm#i1066493

This involves creating a directory that will be the root directory of your deployment, let’s call it FooApplication that has FooApplication.ear and FooWeb.war. This is called the Application Installation Directory. Your application goes in the FooApplication/app sub-directory whether it is an archive (like .ear, .war, jar) or whether it is an exploded version of one of those archives. Your optional deployment plan (you must have one to use this feature, it could be a plan that does not do much beyond specifying a config-root element and values as described in the documentation) goes in the FooApplication/plan. You can put your properties that you want to override ones in the application in FooApplication/plan/AppFileOverrides directory structure.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/web.1111/e13702/deployunits.htm#sthref9

Once that style of deployment is done, you write code like this from your application and the contents of myApp.properties get read from the FooApplication/plan/AppFileOverrides/FooWeb.war/myApp.properties will be the actual file that is read in.

Properties myAppProps = new Properties();
InputStream iostream =
Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("myCfg/myApp.properties");
myAppProps.load(iostream);

This is accomplished by adding a classloader to your application as explained in the docs. It might seem tedious to initially configure, but it is a feature that directly satisfies the original question and only for that particular application.