Trying to diplay jpg images in JSP.....plz help

Question

I have a set of jpg images that I have stored in my server, not in a database. So far, my code can iterate over the directory the images are stored in and can display them as links that users can click on. I can locally click on these links and see the images pop up but anybody outside on the internet can see these links but when clicked upon, show nothing. Here is my code so far.
<h1>Welcome to the CT Image page </h1>
<hr>
<%
String SS = request.getParameter("Social Security");
String directory = "d:\\temp\\Tomcat\\jakarta-tomcat-4.0.3\\webapps\\ROOT\\Mproject\\CT-Images\\" + SS;
File dataDir = new File(directory);
if(!(dataDir.exists()) && !(dataDir.isDirectory()))
%>
     <jsp:forward page = "Reject2.jsp" />
<%
File[] listing = dataDir.listFiles();
for(int x = 0; x < listing.length; x++)
     out.println("<li>" + " <a href = "+ listing[x] +" " +"</a>" + "</li>");
     out.println(listing[x]);
%>
I am wondering how to I go about making these images avaiable to be viewed by ppl on the internet who is accessing my server. Any help on this matter is greatly appreciated. Thank you
Andrew

Answer 1

Whether you want to have links to the images or put them in the page directly, you have the same problems:
File[] listing = dataDir.listFiles();
out.println("<li><a href=\""+ listing[x] +"\">" + listing[x] + "</a></li>");First was that you have bad HTML formatting in your "list" elements. It should be more like above.
Second, the values for listing[x] are not correct for the web page. The values are going to end up being files, which should print out the absolute path of that File, so you'd get something like this:
d:\\temp\\Tomcat\\jakarta-tomcat-4.0.3\\webapps\\ROOT\\Mproject\\CT-Images\\xxxxx\\image1.jpg
This would only ever work on your PC, cuz this is not the proper way to write URLs for a web site. You want the image URLs to be like this:
/Mproject/CT-Images/xxxxx/image1.jpg
So that it's a relative path to the image from the server's root directory. If you know ahead of time that the path is always going to be that, you can have this:
String directory = "d:\\..........." + SS;
String basepath = "/Mproject/CT-Images/" + SS + "/";
File[] listing = dataDir.listFiles();
String filename = listing[x].getName();
out.println("<li><a href=\""+ basepath + filename +"\">" + filename + "</a></li>");
// or to just show the image
out.println("<img src=\""+ basepath + filename +"\" />");