Local JNLP filename is truncated in windows shortcut

Question

Greetings,
I've got a problem with JNLP shortcut paths getting truncated. I'm running Windows XPsp2 as the client with Java 1.5.0.10.
The web URL I'm accessing is dynamically generated, and is apparently getting too long to be handled. I'm passing only the necessary data keys within an encoded URL, something like:
http://server.domain.com:port/application/jnlp/5t-cjxLGtlRl4ZbRO.zIYu61f32GNDSvTby.W8mvgHhCQVHbbRnoSjLdvCqz9u-KmOAAq9uJYDe9i1RgD7kMuAg-udKBBq5xK.O5Od.uhx9ASvD.JnPMUImR9WMl-iUfFtH38.c04u2M1055QiOL8A__
and using a URI mapping within my web-app for +/jnlp/*+ to get the request into my servlet for decoding and dynamic JNLP generation. Within the servlet I decode the keys and, based on other data retrievals, generate the JNLP file for that user.
Everything works very smoothly, as long as the encoded string doesn't exceed a certain length.
Whatever the length of the URL, the application launches from the web with no problem. But, my application needs to support being launched offline, and so it I have to set to create windows shortcuts when launched.
When the URL length gets to be too long, the shortcuts fail to find the icon, and when launched from the shortcut generates the following error:
An error occurred while launching/running the application.
Category: Invalid Argument Error
Could not load file/URL specified: C:\Documents and Settings\user12\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache\javaws\http\Dserver.domain.com\Pport\DMapplication\DMjnlp\AM5t-cjxLGtlRl4ZbRO.zIYu61f32GNDSvTby.W8mvgHhCQVHbbRnoSjLdvCqz9u-KmOAAq9uJYDe9i1RgD7kMuAg-udKBBq5xK.O5Od.uhx9ASvD.JWith the last, in this case 39, characters truncated off the string.
I'm not sure if this is a JavaWeb limitation, where the javaws application can only handle a directory path up to 252 characters.
Or (in my opinion more likely) this is a Microsoft limitation, where the full shortcut target can't exceed 293 characters.
While I've been able to manually to (on my development system) recreate these shortcuts as:
Target: C:\WINDOWS\system32\javaws.exe -offline "5t-cjxLGtlRl4ZbRO.zIYu61f32GNDSvTby.W8mvgHhCQVHbbRnoSjLdvCqz9u-KmOAAq9uJYDe9i1RgD7kMuAg-udKBBq5xK.O5Od.uhx9ASvD.JnPMUImR9WMl-iUfFtH38.c04u2M1055QiOL8A__"
Start in: C:\Documents and Settings\user12\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache\javaws\http\Dserver.domain.com\Pport\DMapplication\DMjnlp
And the shortcuts function as expected. But, I clearly won't have that level of control over the end user's system configurations.
Has anyone else encountered/overcome this limitation?
And if so what was the workaround?
Thanks.

Answer 1

One ugly hack that I've found can be made to work, as part of my web start application, using the http://www.optimumx.com/download/ shortcut.exe executable, and dancing around the system properties:
System.getProperty ("os.name", "").toLowerCase ().matches ("^.*windows*.$");
System.getProperty ("user.home", ".").replace ('\\', '/');
System.getProperty ("java.io.tmpdir", userHome).replace ('\\', '/');
Since, I'm running with a signed application for other reasons, I can extract the the executable as a resource from the jar file, play it out into the temp directory, and use it to update the shrotcuts, resetting the parameters, start in directory, and icon locations of the *.lnk file.
But, this is a very ugly workaround for what looks like a simple buffer overflow problem.