Why does a relative path not make sense?
Because it's not deterministic. It's relative to the cwd where the JVM was started, which is IMHO a totally dumb thing.
You're right. But why do we have this "totally dumb thing" (sic)
implemented *as a standard*? We provide out-of-the-box a "totally dumb thing" like:
in the configuration file:
<root-collection dbroot="./db/" name="db">
and even in your code:
String dbRoot = conf.getAttribute(Database.DBROOT, "./db/");
since users (including myself) were totally helpless in finding the path to their data.
Right once again.
2. put a non-valid value in system.xml and forbid the database start if the user doesn't configure that file.
this is for me the right solution. And you can have a running system by (1/2) unpacking the release, (3) modify the system.xml file, (4) modify the server.xml file. What I proposed in my previous mail.
Not true. The database will happily live under WEB-INF/db
My question: how does the user know that the db is under WEB-INF/db ? Your solution is to write a warn message into the log file.
log.warn("The database root directory has been set to "
+ realPath + System.getProperty("file.separator") + dbRoot
+ ". Keep in mind that if a war upgrade will take place the
database"
+ " will be lost.");but: - noone (at least I don't) reads the log file if everything works fine - log files are deleted constantly
In the end, the user is very likely to *not know* where the db is. Which -as you rightly pointed out- is "not a pleasant user experience".
The risk that someone deletes the database (by reinstalling/upgrading Xindice) is not 0. And the user's data are way more important than a few steps to follow.
-Vladimir
-- Vladimir R. Bossicard Apache Xindice - http://xml.apache.org/xindice
