Question

I’m pretty new to Spring, so apologies if I don’t see the obvious answer here.

I set up small demo project with a Spring MVC controller and deployed it to App Engine. In my controller I would like to read the content of a static file into a String. What’s the best way of doing that?

I googled a bit but I’m probably searching for the wrong thing. I tried the below, but it does not work:

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/myController")
public class MyController {

    @RequestMapping(value = "/test", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public @ResponseBody String myTest() {

        FileReader fileReader = null;
        BufferedReader bufferedReader = null;
        String content = "";
        try {
            fileReader = new FileReader("file:/WEB-INF/content/somecontent.txt");
            bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(fileReader);
            content = bufferedReader.readLine();
            bufferedReader.close(); 
        }
        catch (Exception ignored) { 
            // ignore
        }
        return content;
    }
}

Any push into the right direction will be highly appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

The notation “file:” and “classpath:” isn’t right with FileReader.
I suggest you to create a FileSystemResource

FileSystemResource resource = new FileSystemResource("/WEB-INF/content/somecontent.txt");

and then to use getFile() or getInputStream() to read file.
This is very useful in a web application, because you can use relative path.