>From what I've read, it seems that if you package your web application in a WAR file, you have no way of attaining a path on the server's file system that you can use to write files. Reference: http://mikal.org/interests/java/tomcat/archive/view?mesg=15006.
I have a web app that we'd like to package as a WAR. But, we need to be able to write various data files out to the server's file system. What solution(s) are people using for this? Writing the files to a database is not acceptable for us (I'm not a DBMS expert, but have been told that BLOB performance is not great, and that using a DB as a file system replacement is not good, etc.). I was thinking we'd have to do a bit of a hack... Basically, at the time we "install" our application, the user will pick the real path on their disk where the data files are stored. We then store this in a property in web.xml, and retrieve that in the app for using as the path. For links/hrefs on a web page, we'd just use something like /data_files, but then set up a path-mapping that had /data_files mapped to say /home/appname/data_files or whatever. I also am assuming I will need to ensure that this real path lies outside of the WAR expanded directory because someday Tomcat (and maybe others already?) will not expand the WAR file. Anyway, what have folks come up with? While we use Tomcat for all our development work, we'll likely have to support a variety of Servlet containers (I think we can require at least Servlet 2.2, hopefully 2.3). ____ Chris Bailey mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Code Intensity http://www.codeintensity.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>