Reading Internationalised Bundles Outside of a Jar File

Question

I have seen this question many times throughout this forum and other forums where a jar file is tryingto load a resource outside of the jar file. The answers are often scattered or partial solutions. This is an attempt to provide a complete solution.
Step 1)
In your manifest file add to the Class-Path attribute the current directory, ie . plus any other library files you require (seperated with spaces).
for example
Class-Path: . lib/log4j.jar
Step 2)
In your code, make sure that you are correctly requesting the resource. If you are requesting a resource from the directory where you are running your jar file from (i.e. the working directory), simply use ResourceBundle.getBundle("Resource"); or equivalent method.
If you bundle is within a directory, you must specify the directory when getting the Bundle as a dot seperated string, i.e.
ResourceBundle.getBundle("etc.i18n.Resource"); would look for the file <working-directory)/etc/i18n/Resource.properties.
I hope this may help people having problems with this excellent tool. Please feel free to add to this tutorial or amend any mistakes I may have made.
Good Luck
codemwnci

Answer 1

I followed the instructions here and had every thing correct. I created the jar with ant using fearly standard build.xml. Things didn't still work out. Spent few hours wondering why things don't work.
Reason: the property-files were not included in indexing.
Basically there is two way around:
1) Add the property files to the index of the jar.
The problem here is that you cannot have new property-files without creating the index again.
2) Don't do the indexing for the jar.
In this case the jar is not so well optimazed, and in some case that may be a little problem.