Accessing a configuration file from a Web Service

Question

I have a business logic class that loads in a file of records and then has various searching methods provided. The way that it is currently used is via a servlet that has one parameter in the web.xml file that is the location of the properties file. This servlet creates a Configuration singleton by passing the location from the web.xml. The Configuration singleton reads in the properties file. The business logic class gets the location of the record file from the Configuration singleton to then read it in. I am trying to wrap this business logic class with a web service now and am not sure how to go about initializing the Configuration singleton without hardcoding the location of the properties file.
Can anyone tell me what the best method of reading in configuration items from within a web service (i.e. an equivalent to the servlet web.xml method)? Where in the EAR or WAR should this properties file be located and then how do you get to it? I am using WebLogic 8.1 and creating the web service with the WebLogic Ant tasks (servicegen, wspackage, clientgen, etc.).
Thanks,
Adam

Answer 1

okay, so actually, was attributing my problem to the wrong thing. in fact, another coding error (the way i was reading lines from the buffered reader) is to blame. turns out you CAN read from a file in the init or the doGet...
bear with me, i'm just learning but anybody able to tell me why i can't trigger a FileNotFoundException here, even if i pass the FileReader a file that doesn't exist:
try {
BufferedReader r = new
BufferedReader(new FileReader("???"));
String s = r.readLine();
int i=1, j=0;
while (s != null) {
if (i%2==0) {
mailInfo[j] = s;
j++;
s = r.readLine();
i++;
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}