How to get File Reference of a properties file from EJB

Question

Hi,
I am using Sun App server 7 with Oracle 9i. I am keeping all my SQL statements in a properties file from which I am loading it while making a database operation from Stateless beans. My problem is I am not able to get the reference of the properties file. Here is the code through which I am getting the SQL statements loaded to a cache.
String sqlFileName = "SQL.properties";
sqlCache.load(new FileInputStream(sqlFileName));
From the cache I am sending the SQL statement depending on the key value. But the problem is I have to keep the SQL.properties file on the App Server config directory of the instance where the server.xml file resides. Otherwise it is not able to find the properties file. But I don't want to put the properties file on the config directory of the server instance. Please help how to get the properties file from the packakge. My file is residing inside a package com.company.sql . Botht the properties file and the class accessing the file are residing in the same package. Please help how to get the reference of the file with out putting the file in the config directory.
Thanks
Amit Patnaik

Answer 1

Just wanted to warn you of the hazards if you read a file from EJB
So please make sure that these hazards will not affect your application. However the solution suggested to use getResourceStream() concurs with ejbSpec
This snippet is from suns blueprint on ejb
Why can't EJBs read and write files and directories in the filesystem? And why can't they access file descriptors?
Enterprise beans aren't allowed to access files primarily because files are not transactional resources. Allowing EJBs to access files or directories in the filesystem, or to use file descriptors, would compromise component distributability, and would be a security hazard.
Another reason is deployability. The EJB container can choose to place an enterprise bean in any JVM, on any machine in a cluster. Yet the contents of a filesystem are not part of a deployment, and are therefore outside of the EJB container's control. File systems, directories, files, and especially file descriptors tend to be machine-local resources. If an enterprise bean running in a JVM on a particular machine is using or holding an open file descriptor to a file in the filesystem, that enterprise bean cannot easily be moved from one JVM or machine to another, without losing its reference to the file.
Furthermore, giving EJBs access to the filesystem is a security hazard, since the enterprise bean could potentially read and broadcast the contents of sensitive files, or even upload and overwrite the JVM runtime binary for malicious purposes.
Files are not an appropriate mechanism for storing business data for use by components, because they tend to be unstructured, are not under the control of the server environment, and typically don't provide distributed transactional access or fine-grained locking. Business data is better managed using a persistence interface such as JDBC, whose implementations usually provide these benefits. Read-only data can, however, be stored in files in a deployment JAR, and accessed with the getResource() or getResourceAsStream() methods of java.lang.Class.
Hope this info helps!