Servlet and IO - help needed

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

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....

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....

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

Bosun

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!

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.