Re: About jars and accessing stuff inside
Philipp wrote:
Andrew Thompson wrote:
Perhaps it is better to investigate why you believe you
need to get a list of files that were (supposedly) put there
by you in the first place.
What is the actual end purpose of this exercise?
What does it bring to the end user?
OK I have a tool in my application which has some factory presets which
are offered to the user. These presets are written in XML and stored in
the jar at /resources/presets/
- Use a logical sequence for the file names
(e.g. 1.preset.xml to 299.preset.xml) store the
highest number xml name in a file with a known name.
(e.g. /resources/presets/total.dat).
- Use ant to build the project and write a list of
the xml preset files into a list of known name.
- Extend that to a web-start based (1.5+) launch
with lazy downloads (assuming these files are big),
and test for each (sequentially named) presets file
using the JNLP API.
- Compact the 299 preset files into a single file of
all presets, with a known name.
Now I don't want to hard code each name of the (many) factory presets.
Ant might build a list of them for you, but
there are also other ways to go about it,
as noted above.
.....
How should I do this cleanly?
I am no 'master of design', so I am just kicking a
few ideas about.
My scenario is also interesting, because the user can build his own
presets and save them somewhere in a folder on his file system (not in
the jar!).
The best way to do this is to either
a) Not offer the user a chioice of where to put them,
but to store them in a file in a sub-directory (based
on the reverse package name of your classes, to
avoid name collisions!) of "user.home".
b) Offer the user to choose where to store the presets
(e.g. using a JFileChooser), then store that *location*
as a string in the same place mentioned above
(sub-dir of user.home).
Andrew T.