About help file's directory

[Davidd Smith]

Hi, all,
I have a help menu when select will show a JEditorPane contains the userguide. I have the relative directory of the userguide in my programe.
But when I run the jar file from other directory other than the directory contains the relative directory, the system could not found it. How could I do to deal with it wherever I run the application?
Recards
Davidd
[ September 28, 2003: Message edited by: Davidd Smith ]

[James Hook]

I wrote a routine that iterated through all the classpaths. If the classpath was a .jar file, then I had to use a JAR url to retrieve the helpfile from the JAR file.

URL url = new URL("jar:file:Help.jar!/help.txt");
edpHelpText.setPage(url.toString());

[Jim Yingst]

You might want to take a look at ClassLoader.getSystemResource(). It also may be worthwhile to put a copy of your documentation in runme.jar, to guarantee it will be accessible. In my instructions at least, the appication might be started from any directory, and we can't make any assumptions about the prexisting classpath. But we do know that the application is started with
java -jar runme.jar [mode]
So we know that runme.jar is in the classpath, even if nothing else is.

[Davidd Smith]

Hi,
Jim and James,
Thank you for your reply, I see
Regards
Davidd

[Philippe Maquet]

Jim:
You might want to take a look at ClassLoader.getSystemResource().
Nice ! I didn't know that method. I wrote a getExecutionPathOf(Class aClass) method which could be simplified with ClassLoader.getSystemResource() IMO :

    /**
     * Returns the execution path (.class path name) of a given class.
     *
     * <p>The returned path name includes a trailing File.separator.</p>
     *
     * Special cases:
     * <ul>
     * <li>If the class was executed from a <b>jar file</b>, the path returned is the jar file path.</li>
     * <li>If any exception is thrown during the process, System.getProperty("user.dir") is returned instead
     * (best effort).
     * </ul>
     *
     * @param aClass  the class whose execution path has to be returned
     * @return the execution path name of a the given class
     */
    public static String getExecutionPathOf(Class aClass) {
        String pathOfClass;
        try {
            String className = aClass.getName(); // full class name includes package name
            String pureClassName = className.substring(className.lastIndexOf(
                '.') + 1);
            URL url = aClass.getResource(pureClassName + ".class");
            pathOfClass = new File( (new URI("file://" + url)).getPath()).
                getParent();
            int posExclamationMark = pathOfClass.indexOf('!');
            if (posExclamationMark != -1) { // class is in a jar file
                pathOfClass = pathOfClass.substring(0,
                    pathOfClass.lastIndexOf(File.separator, posExclamationMark)
                    + 1);
            }
            else {
                pathOfClass += File.separator;
            }
        }
        //catch (java.net.URISyntaxException e) {
        catch (Exception e) {
            pathOfClass = System.getProperty("user.dir") + File.separator;
        }
        return pathOfClass;
    }

Anyway Davidd, passing any of your classes (the main one is a good candidate) to such a method will return the absolute path where your runme.jar is.
Best,
Phil.
[ September 30, 2003: Message edited by: Philippe Maquet ]