How to convert vfs protocol to file protocol.

[nick.sree]

Can anybody know how to convert vfs:/xyz file to file:/xyz which work across Unix, Linux, Mac and Windows

URL url = some virtual file url;

new File(URLDecoder.decode(url.getFile(),"UTF-8")).toURI().toURL(); this works except in Mac.

[guinotphil]

You may not be able to do this. A VFS resource can refer to something within a JAR, WAR file, etc..

Do you really need to create a File instance... In many cases, URL.openStream() is okay...

[alesj]

Like guinotphil says, vfs url might not point to File instance, it's impl detail.

If you really need a File, then you will probably have to hack this via AS extension / deployment unit processor.

But, as already suggested, stream normally does the trick.

[nick.sree]

vfs is not supported by some of the framework's  api, so we need to have some mechanism to convert vfs to file protocol. I'm not so convinced using openStream or openConnection to make this work done, do you know any other tweak.

[guinotphil]

I had this kind of issue with a couple of libs as well.

For one of them, which I had the source, I recompiled it to accept the configuration as a stream instead of a file.

For the other one, I did not had the source, so I had to deploy the files outsite of the EAR. Then the directory of those files is passed to the server as a system property in standalone.xml.

[nick.sree]

Thanks for your suggestion.

Mainly we are getting this problem from struts2 framework. We can't modify the source for our purpose, since it may lead to problem while upgrading the framework. I dont think struts2 will work if we deploy it outside the EAR.

[guinotphil]

Can you give more details about what Struts 2 tries to do ? The stracktrace or anything ? Thx

[alesj]

vfs is not supported by some of the framework's  api, so we need to have some mechanism to convert vfs to file protocol. I'm not so convinced using openStream or openConnection to make this work done, do you know any other tweak.

Sometimes (good) frameworks have resource lookup abstractions; e.g. Seam, Drools, Spring, ... have it

And for those we managed to get proper VFS based impl working.

Struts2 is widely adopted framework, hence it might have something similar?

[nick.sree]

The bad part is that still struts2 latest is facing some problem in JBoss AS 5 and JBoss  AS 7 in different OS... I have provided patch twice to get rid of this problem. But recent struts2 upgrades (fixes) broke those patches. Please see the below apache jira link.

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WW-3803

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WW-3662

after the above recent fix it broken for JBoss AS 5

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WW-3810

There are lots more