Getting a list of images from a jar file

[Jay Brass]

I know this topic is a little old but I have a similar problem. I can access an image from the executable jar while the application is running using this:

JPanel panel = new JPanel();
ImageIcon icon = new ImageIcon(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResource("ABC.png"));
JLabel label = new JLabel();
label.setIcon(icon);
panel.add(label);

That works fine for 1 image. What I would like to do is read the entire directory of images and load them without having to hardcode the name of each and every image.

The below code works fine from eclipse but when I make an executable jar file, it doesn't work anymore.

 String path = ".";
    String files;
    File folder = new File(path);
    
    File[] listOfFiles = folder.listFiles();
    for (int i = 0; i < listOfFiles.length; i++) {
	    if (listOfFiles[i].isFile()) {
	    files = listOfFiles[i].getName();
		   
		    	System.out.println(files);
		    	 if(files.endsWith("jpg")){
					File image = (File)listOfFiles[i];
					Image img;
					try {
						img = ImageIO.read(image);
						JLabel label = new JLabel(new ImageIcon(img));
						f.add(label);
					} catch (IOException e1) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e1.printStackTrace();
					}
				}
			}
		}

In the above code f is a JFrame I created earlier in the code.
I have a piece of code that tries to get the resources

Enumeration<URL> en = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResources(".");
		while(en.hasMoreElements()){
			 URL imageNoteUrl = (URL)en.nextElement();
			 try {
				System.out.println("URL "+imageNoteUrl.toURI());
			} catch (URISyntaxException e1) {
				// TODO Auto-generated catch block
				e1.printStackTrace();
			}
}

but that points to the workspace where the project is: ......./workspace/Images/bin and that won't work from the runnable jar when I execute the jar from my desktop or from another machine.
how can I access a list of all the .jpg files in my runnable jar without hard coding the names of each of them?

[Jay Brass]

Looking at some of the other topics in the forum, it looks like one way to read all the images is to create a Table of Contents (TOC) list. It won't be hard to implement but is an extra maintenance step I had hoped to avoid. If I write the code correctly, checking for null, I won't have to worry about the directory of images and the TOC being in sync, as long as the images I want to show are correctly referenced in the TOC.