Application starts IE and needs to access html inside Jar

Question

Hi everyone,
I have a Swing application which i have deployed as an executable Jar file. One of the options i give the users within this application is the ability to view a html file in their default browser. However the html file is packaged within the jar and i cannot get Internet Explorer to target the html file when it exists inside the jar.
I fire up IE using the following command :
Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "rundll32 url.dll,FileProtocolHandler <path to html file>" ).
The above command works no problem if my html file exists on my hard drive so for example the following works no problem:
Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "rundll32 url.dll,FileProtocolHandler C:\test\help.html" )
I have tried the following command by getting the URL for the html file using :
URL theURL = myClass.class.getClassLoader().getSystemResource( "help.html" );
I then get a path to the file:
File aFile = new File( theURL.getFile() );
String htmlFile = aFile.getAbsolutePath();
and execute the command
Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "rundll32 url.dll,FileProtocolHandler" + " " + htmlFile )
However this was not successfull either.Can anyone tell me how i might get internet explorer to display a html file which is packaged within a jar.
Thanks :)

Answer 1

An idea. Never tried anything like this myself, so don't know if it will work. Don't see why it shouldn't though.
A jar file is just a file in the zip format so write some code that uses the tools in java.util.zip to unpack the jar (or just specific contents) to somewhere like /temp
Then use the runtime exec to start the browser with the argument /temp/file.html
Hope this helps.