Java placeholders: reference to webapp folder

Question

I'm building a webapp for uploading content. At the moment, I'm using a properties file where I define some variables containing the path to some folders where I want the files to be stored. These paths refer to folders in my file system.

P1: Since I want to make my app more portable, I decided to store my uploaded contents in some folder inside the project classpath but the path I use in the placeholder is not working.

#path.images=C:/uploads/images #path.images=classpath:/webapp/uploads/images (NOT working)

Q1: If it's possible, I would like to know if I'm storing the content in the right place (inside webapp directory).

NOTE: I'm making these changes also because I'm trying to replace the FileInputStream with the getResourceAsStream().

Any help will be much appreciated.

That's a good option. Though I'm not sure I'll be able to the use the getResourceAsStream() since the Tomcat directory will finally point to somewhere like C:\var\webapp\upload. To clarify a bit, this whole mess is related to this Primefaces issue: code.google.com/p/primefaces/issues/detail?id=3546 — CountD
– CountD, Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 14:58

Dave Newton · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-29 14:30:10Z

No; assets not deployed with the application should be stored elsewhere.

Generally assets like this would belong in a configurable, external directory. Configuration mechanisms include JNDI, context/init parameter, environment variable, or system variables.

Keeping assets inside the web application is a bad idea for multiple reasons, the biggest being:

If the app is deployed as a war file you can't write into the war file anyway, and
Your assets are at the mercy of your deployment mechanism and could be over-written.

Keep them in a known-good location and either stream them back, configure access through your container, or use any of a variety of CDN mechanisms to provide access.

secra · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-29 14:32:47Z

You cannot store data in the classpath - it's read-only.

For maximum portablilty you should refrain from storing data in the filesystem at all (in a clustering scenario you would need to make sure your filesystem is the same on all nodes for example).

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