Develop Reference

Storing data in text files with Java/Maven

I wrote a little Java app for analyzing .csv files. Now I want to keep reading from and writing to a .txt file, which acts similar to a mini-database. For this purpose I simply added the .txt in my project and used the Files.readString(Path) and Files.write(Path path, byte[] bytes) methods.
When I do this in IntelliJ I have no problems but as soon as I build/export the file with Maven and started with the created launcher the app didn't work because the project structure / file organization isn't the same anymore.
I also tried to just add the .txt file to the exported folder afterwards but even then I couldn't manage to implement a relative path to the file.
I'm still relatively new to programming and it's just a small app so I don't think mySQL would fit my needs. I've also read that I could store the data in a property file but I don't know if that would be the right way to archive what I want. Certainly it must be possible to somehow keep a .txt for reading and writing in your exported project. Does someone have an idea?

If you use a ´*.txt` file for storing, that file cannot be inside the jar because the jar cannot change its contents while running.
You need to put the file somewhere else, either at some dedicated location (let the user choose/configure one), or next to the jar. To figure out your own execution path, you can use
How to get the path of a running JAR file?

Maven is one tricky tool. You need to go to the pom file and add the resource.
Unable to add resources to final jar for maven project in Intellij.
-I hope this helps
Trader

Java - Cross-platform filepath

I'm trying to develop a cross-platform application that works on Desktop and Android as well using JavaFX and Gluon.
At runtime my code creates a serialized file in my resource folder. I also need to read and write serialized data from/to it.
I managed to work it on desktop, but not on android. Because it have a different file structure I guess.
That is why I try to get the file path dynamically.
Existing resource files, which are created before runtime (and not modified) seems to works fine on both platform.
I tried with new File("src/main/resources/folder/file.ser").getAbsolutePath(); and by trying to access it from my root folder like this: getClass.getResources("/folder/file.ser").getPath();. Both of them works fine on desktop (Windows) but unfortunately Android does not find the file by file path.
An other problem could be that I should not create runtime files in the resource folder but then where should I?
Any idea how can I read and write runtime created files that works both on android and desktop?
(If the information is not enough to help me, I try to reproduce my code in a minimal form and provide further details.)

I think you are on a completely wrong track. Creating or writing to files in the resource folder does not work in general. The idea is that files in the resource folder get packaged into jar files or are otherwise bundled with an application and are not writable at runtime.
What you should do is to create an application folder when your program is launched for the first time. A common practice on desktop is for example to create an invisible folder ".myApp" in the users home directory. On other platforms like Android there are other platform specific naming and location rules, but the concept is the same. At first launch time you can also copy necessary resources from your resource folder into this application folder so that you can edit them at runtime.

Resource files with a path on the class path, could be packed in a jar and should be considered read-only, especially as resources might be cached in some cases. They are not File. They can be captured by URL, URI, Path. The paths are case-sensitive and the path separator is /.
Hence resources can only be used as a template, an initial file. They should be copied to a real File, outside the application.
Path path = Paths.get(System.getProperty("user.home"), ".myapp/file.ser");
Files.createDirectories(path.getParent());
if (Files.exists(path)) {
URL url = MyClass.class.getResource("/folder/file.ser");
Path template = Paths.get(url.toURI());
Files.copy(template, path);
}
Furthermore .ser, a serialized java object, is not a good idea. I would suggest XML
using JAXB with annotations. More readable, maintainable, versionable. No clash between development JRE at your place and deployed JRE at the client.

How to create exe/jar file in netbeans that can be easily run on any other system

i hv created the .jar file by building my project in netbeans.
The .jar file exist in "dist/myproject.jar". But when i move it to
any other system will it find the paths specified for images etc in
project?
As i am giving the paths like
(C:/Users/Lucky/Documents/NetBeansProjects/CoverageAnalyzer/src/coverageanalyzer/icons/icon.png).
OR When i write path just to approach root directory as
(icons/icon.png), so then also?
Summary: What is the actual way that i can write/copy my .jar file to
any other system without spoiling the paths and program run correctly
on any other system. Thanks in advance.help will be appriciated

You can use one of the following approaches:
Use relative paths (relative to the executable file location) instead of absolute paths.
Use paths under a known absolute path (an installation folder, path from environment variable / configuration file / registry key, the user's directory (user.home) etc.)
Use resources embeded into your jar. See Class.getResource() and Class.getResourceAsStream()
Note that you should consider cross-platform (Windows/Linux/Mac) and resource hiding issues when selecting a suitable approach.

The solution is to put the auxiliary files as resources into to jar. The program must then load them from the class path instead of the file system.
Have a look at Class.getResourceAsStream.

How to access Jar file located within source folders?

in my Java project I am using an H2 in-memory database, for which I have to load the JDBC driver when I initialize my application. I want/need to load the H2 .jar file dynamically, so I do the following:
String classname = "org.h2.Driver";
URL u = new URL("jar:file:libs/h2.jar!/");
URLClassLoader ucl = new URLClassLoader(new URL[] { u });
Driver d = (Driver) Class.forName(classname, true, ucl).newInstance();
DriverManager.registerDriver(new DriverShim(d));
When I put the H2 .jar file into a "libs" folder outside my Java source code folder (that is, in Eclipse, this "libs" directory is on the same level as the "src" folder), then this approach works fine. However, unfortunately I have to put this H2 .jar file into a folder within the source code folder tree, but below the main class folder.
For example, my Java package structure looks like this in Eclipse:
<project>/src/my/app/MyApp.java // main class of my application
<project>/src/my/app/sub/package/h2.jar // how to access this?
<project>/libs/h2.jar // loading from here works
I know this is stupid, but unfortunately I have to work with this strange setup. But what I don't know: how can I edit my Java code (listed above) in order to work with this setup?
EDIT: This has to work outside Eclipse as well, so adding the JAR file to the Java Build Path in Eclipse is no option for me.
EDIT2: I already tried to load "jar:file:my/app/sub/package/h2.jar!/", but that did not work for me.
Thanks in advance for all helpful ideas!
Kind regards, Matthias

In some frameworks referring to files inside JARs can be done using the classpath: prefix. I doubt URLClassLoader supports it natively, but it's worth a try (e.g. classpath:/my/app/sub/package/h2.jar). But since that doesn't work with URLClassLoader, here are other ways:
One way to do it would be to write your own ClassLoader which reads the JAR file from classpath (using getResourceAsStream), uncompresses it (using ZipInputStream) to memory (e.g. a map of byte arrays) and loads the classes from there.
Another, slightly easier way, is to read the JAR file from classpath and write it into a temporary file. Then you can use the plain URLClassLoader to load classes from it. This has the disadvantage that the file must be written to a file and the file probably cannot be removed until the JVM exits (unless using Java 7 or higher).
I'm using the second approach (copying to a temp file) in one project, though I'm using it to launch an external process. I would be curious to hear why you have such a requirement. If it's just a matter of having the whole application in one JAR, there are numerous simpler methods for achieving that (Maven Assembly Plugin, Maven Shade Plugin, Jar Jar Links, One-JAR to name a few).
No it's not a homework, but an online build system that uses my classes under my/app/* and several other classes (not from me) to automatically build the whole solution. Anyway, I can't give you more details on the internals of this system, as I don't know them. As said, I simply have to live with it, and that is why I am asking here...
Sounds like you are working in a WTF environment (does it have a name?), so here are some ways to start hacking around it:
Find out more about your environment, especially absolute file paths of the following: directory where the source files are saved, directory where the generated .class files are saved, and the current working directory when the program is run.
If you can get any kind of output of what your program prints during runtime, you can put into your application some debug code where you use File.listFiles() to crawl the machine's directory trees. If you can get output only from what happens when compiling, it might be possible to execute your own code during compile by creating your own annotation processor (apt is part of javac since Java 6), though I'm not sure whether the annotation processor must be compiled first separately.
The working directory can be read from the user.dir system property and the location of class files can be probably gotten from the java.class.path system property (unless custom class loaders are used). There is no guarantee that a JAR file in the source directory would be copied to the classpath, so you might need to do some looking around.
Then when you know the file path of the JAR file, then you can get an URL to it using new File("path/to/h2.jar").toURI().toURL() which you can then pass to URLClassLoader.
If nothing else works, upload the source code of the libraries and compile them together with your project.
In the long run, try to replace the WTF build environment with one that uses a standard build tool (such as Maven) and a common CI server (such as Jenkins). It's normal for projects to have lots of library dependencies, so you shouldn't need to hack around a build environment to use them.

home folder changes when using java classes from matlab

I am writing a java application with a matlab ui. For this I use java objects in matlab as explained here: http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/matlab_external/f4873.html
those java classes reference (using a relative path) to resources in some other folder in the parent map. In eclipse or as an executable jar this all works fine.
The problem is that when classes are used in matlab the homefolder changes. So instead of looking in JAR/resources or PROJECTMAP/resources it looks for the resources in MATLAB/resources and returns a file not found exception.
how I currently solved it is kinda lame:
I simply put a copy of the resource folder in the MATLAB directory which makes the code execute.
Yet this is a poor solution.
What I would want is
1: to include the resource folder in the jar (generated in eclipse) an make it possible to use these classes in matlab (in short: independency current directory)
2: Being able to run the same code from eclipse (to debug/profile...).
3: That the code should execute independantly of the location the jar is in as long as it is added to the matlab classpath. (so the jar does not have to be in a specific folder (eg MATLAB folder))
So I 'simply' need a way to specify the location of the resource folder in my code as to achieve 1,2,3 (1,2 most important).

Not sure how you're reading and what you're doing with these resources (so this might not be the correct solution for your case), but you indeed might want to put these on your classpath. If you put them in their own source folder in eclipse you can setup your build to include them in your jar. (Maven by convention has a /src/main/resources directory that is for sticking arbitrary files into a the compiled jar).
With these resources on the classpath... You can then use the classloader to load files through getClass().getResourceAsStream() or getResource() and run with it.