No, that's not true at all.

The examples already given will find properties files for you just fine whether the file is in a directory structure or inside an archive. How do you think Java loads classes? It works out of archives, no?

here are some various was to access a properties file ( or any resource, for that matter) in whether the app is deployed as a directory or as a .war file (even inside a .jar file in WEB-INF/lib)....

This will load a file in WEB-INF/classes/conf or any jar file in the classpath with a package of "conf"... getClass().getResourceAsStream("/conf/db.properties");

This will load a file relative to the current class. For instance, if the class is "org.mypackage.MyClass", then the file would be loaded at "org.mypackage.conf.dbproperties". Note that this is because we didn't prepend "/" to the path. When that is done, the file is loaded from the root of the current classloader where this loads it relative to the current class... getClass().getResourceAsStream("conf/db.properties");

this will find db.properties anywhere in the current classloader as long as it exists in a "conf" package... getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("conf/db.properties");

This will find the file in a "conf" directory inside the webapp (starting from the root). This starts looking in the same directory as contains WEB-INF. When I say "directory", I don't mean "filesystem". This could be in a .war file as well as in an actual directory on the filesystem... getServletContext().getResourceAsStream("/conf/db.properties");

of course you would probably not want just anyone seeing your db.properties file, so you'd probably want to put in inside WEB-INF of your webapp, so.... getServletContext().getResourceAsStream("/WEB-INF/conf/db.properties");

If your db.properties exists in another classloader which your app has access to, you can reach it by using:
Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("conf/db.properties");

That will act similar to getClass().getClassLoader(), but it can see across all available classloaders where the latter can only see within the classloader that loaded the current class.

So, as you can see, you have quite a number of options. There you go.

Jake

At 03:37 PM 12/4/2002 -0800, you wrote: