Can we define path for a bean out side work space?

Question

<bean id="HSBCMarketsReports"
               class="HSBCMarketsReportsConfiguration">
               <property name="reports">
                    <map>
                    <entry key="PinnacleReportsConfig" value="PinnacleReportsConfig.xml"/>
                    <entry key="PinnacleReportsData" value="PinnacleDummyData.xml"/>
                    </map>
               </property>
     </bean>it works well but when make the same as
<bean id="HSBCMarketsReports"
               class="HSBCMarketsReportsConfiguration">
               <property name="reports">
                    <map>
                    <entry key="PinnacleReportsConfig" value="PinnacleReportsConfig.xml"/>
                    <entry key="PinnacleReportsData" value="C:\PinnacleDummyData.xml"/>
                    </map>
               </property>
     </bean>
it says C:\PinnacleDummyData.xml not found i work space , how to make it look for the file out side work space (particularly given location)

Answer 1

LoveOpensource wrote:
<bean id="HSBCMarketsReports"
               class="HSBCMarketsReportsConfiguration">
               <property name="reports">
                    <map>
                    <entry key="PinnacleReportsConfig" value="PinnacleReportsConfig.xml"/>
                    <entry key="PinnacleReportsData" value="PinnacleDummyData.xml"/>
                    </map>
               </property>
     </bean>it works well but when make the same as
<bean id="HSBCMarketsReports"
               class="HSBCMarketsReportsConfiguration">
               <property name="reports">
                    <map>
                    <entry key="PinnacleReportsConfig" value="PinnacleReportsConfig.xml"/>
                    <entry key="PinnacleReportsData" value="C:\PinnacleDummyData.xml"/>
                    </map>
               </property>
     </bean>
it says C:\PinnacleDummyData.xml not found i work space , how to make it look for the file out side work space (particularly given location)Why dont you include the xml file in your workspace/web application?
All these are custom tags, right? So somewhere in the code for the custom tags, it would load the xml file for parsing.
There are different ways to load a file. The first is to use the absolute path (not recommended) and anyways I dont think your application does it that way because then your file would have been loaded even if it's outside the web application folder.
The better approach is to load the file as a resource stream.
The ServletContext object has a method getResourceAsStream() to load files from the web application path. But then the xml file has to be inside the web application and if this is indeed how your tags have been coded, you have no other option but to include the xml file in your web application.
There is another way - to use the ClassLoader's getResourceAsStream() method. The ClassLoader looks up the classpath variable to search for files. In this case, you need to add your xml file location (c:/dir or whatever) to the application server's classpath. Look up in the startup scripts for your application.
As I said, it all depends upon the tag code that looks up the xml file and whether you can tweak it.
cheers,
ram.