Best Practices for path resources

lenburt

Hello out there -- for 3 months our small team has been developing reports in a Windows environment and deploying them to either Tomcat or WebSphere on Windows platforms. Our reports have several data sources -- database, xml, and csv text files. We also have so jpg images. In order to be agile in our development, we hard coded paths to a windows directory (e.g. c:/blah) which contained our files and out database profile credentials. Now we have completed development and need to 'harden' our application and deploy to various Unix platforms where obviously C: will not make it. We have been reading/surfing/experimenting to come up with an approach that will use relative paths which will work on all platforms. For our images, i have found that if we have a resources/images dir below our reports we can reference our jpgs that way. For our file resources and database profile we have not come up with a good way to do that.

My question -- can someone point us to examples / best practices on how to best make our application easy to deploy and configure without hard coded paths. I see in the web.xml that there are variables in there...possibly that is the path we should pursue. Thanks in advance -- len

mwilliams

I believe the web.xml takes relative and complete paths for the resouce folder location, so you should be able to enter a relative path to where your files are. I believe it will need to be relative to the birtViewer folder. Let me know if you run into issues with this.