Creating a platform-independent path

Question

Hello,
I'm working on an application that will be used on different O/S, that reads files stored by the user from anywhere on the system. The problem I have is that I need the paths to be stored such that the user session files still work when moved across computers. e.g.,
for the file on my system with absolute path on my windows machine, which has only one partition (on C):
C:\Documents and Settings\userDir\My Documents\wig\prototype\fileName.jpgnew File(pathToFile).getAbsolutePath() and new File(pathToFile).getPath() - will give the above. However trying to retrieve the same file on any other computer, with the same location from the root, even windows with multiple partitions, say, that has the application on the F drive, say, will fail, because the path cd be, say:
F:\Documents and Settings\userDir\My Documents\wig\prototype\fileName.jpgMoving to MAC or Linux will obviously also fail. However if I can save the file location as:
/Documents and Settings/userDir/My Documents/wig/prototype/fileName.jpgthen it will work on any of these machines and O/S provided that the directory containing said file has the same path to the root from the working directory. Now the latter condition can be replicated on any of the end user machines. However I've searched through the forums and the JDK but cannot find a way of doing this via Java, unless I convert the original absolute path to a string and manually edit that string to arrive at the final. Is there something available that I'm missing - string manipulation, while it will work, is not the optimal solution. FYI - the user selects the file from a file browser, so on save the application calls :
File resource = fileChooser.getSelectedFile();
... resource.getAbsolutePath()
... and so on...Aba-Sah

Answer 1

.. there is no way to tell the relative path from where the program is runno, I don't meant "no way" programmatically - I do know how to do that. What I meant is that I am not able to restrict where on the end user's machine the running program is installed - this is dependent on their system set-up - so it isn't possible to determine the relative path from that location to the directories containing the data.
altho' having said that i think i know where ur going, will need to think about that, it may work...if i restrict relative path of the data directory from the working directory rather than (relative) path from the root.
Edited by: aba-sah on Oct 30, 2008 5:55 AM