How to develop a windows find files like utility in java

Question

hi,
I am writing a java program that provides the same functionality as provided by the Windows find files option. is there some windows dll or something like that i can use thru JNI or is there some better solution?
any help will be appreciated.
regards

Answer 1

If your program has to be portable, I think it would be better to develop Java code in order to search through file system.
I think you should develop objects that allows to filter files (implementing FileFilter interface) and return a list of the found files to your graphical objects.
You can use the java.io.File.listFiles(FileFilter) method to retrieve a list of files from a given directory.
Write several FileFilter classes (and why not FilenameFilter classes) to provide different way of filtering. Each of those will be used with the listFiles method.
But do not forget that the way you write your filefilters will change the performance of your program.
There is also another problem you might encounter : File Access Rights. If your file system contains file restrictions, the listFiles method may throw SecurityException (if a SecurityManager is created) or return null (if no SecurityManager is set).