Servlet and IO - help needed

[Luca Bracci]

Hi guys, obviously I am pretty new in servlets and I have a serious problem.
I want to write the data retrieved from the user to a txt file.
That's sounds easy right but I have been trying this for the past 4 hours , infact I cant even write anythign to a file thru the servlet please help ...
It works fine in a main method of a decent class when I run it but it just doesnt write to the file when I run the servlet...
here is the doGet() method :

public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response)
throws IOException, ServletException
{
response.setContentType("text/html");
PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
try
{
BufferedWriter pw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("memberfile.txt", true));
pw.write("Please work!!");
pw.newLine();
System.out.println("Why isn't it working?");
pw.close();
}
catch(IOException ioe)
{
System.out.println("IOException thrown in writeMember() method");
}

}

Why isn't it writing to the file? is there anything I dont know? ... please help and thanks

[Luca Bracci]

Oh nevermind!!
I got it working
I as just looking for it in the wrong place, the file actually is being saved in the bin folder ,,, oh I learned somethign new today.... snap I am one slow and dumb person....

[Bal Sharma]

I bet, nop you are not. You figured out solution by yourself. Let me drag you down here for a second. I did same as u did. Text file was saved on bin folder. How can I save text file at my root folder not at bin. Like at /mydev. If you have any clue let me know.
BK

Originally posted by Luca Bracci:
Oh nevermind!!
I got it working
I as just looking for it in the wrong place, the file actually is being saved in the bin folder ,,, oh I learned somethign new today.... snap I am one slow and dumb person....

[Bosun Bello]

Can't you just specify the absolute directory?
BufferedWriter pw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("YourRootDir\memberfile.txt", true));

Bosun

[Tim Holloway]

If you give a relative path, there's presently no guarantee WHERE it will go, or even it if will go out to the same directory consistently. A good alternative is to specify the root of your intended directory as an application parameter so you don't have to hard-code it into the program/JSP.
BTW, I always recommend using the Unix form of filenames in Java. Java handles them in an OS-independent way, and you won't get zapped when the compiler turns "YourRootDir\memberfile.txt" into "YourRootDirmemberfile.txt" because the backslash is an ESCAPE character!

[Peter den Haan]

IMHO there are just two clean ways to access the filesystem in a web-application:

• Relative to the web-app root. The call getServletContext().getRealPath(relativePath) will return the absolute path for a resource - for instance, getServletContext().getRealPath("WEB-INF/web.xml") will give you the location of the "web.xml" file. The problem with this approach is, some application servers run the entire web-app from a war or a database, not from the filesystem, and will actually return null. If you just need need read-only access, use getServletContext().getResource(relativePath) or getServletContext().getResourceAsStream(relativePath).
• In a location given by a configurable parameter. The most natural means of configuration is a servlet or application parameter specified in the web.xml file; you can retrieve them using getServletConfig().getInitParameter(name) and getServletContext().getInitParameter(name) respectively.
Arguably, access relative to the user's home directory (System.getProperty("user.home")) should be included in the list; I'm not fond of it because it opens the possiblity of conflicts between web-applications. HTH,
- Peter

[This message has been edited by Peter den Haan (edited October 17, 2001).]