2.6 Reading source relative files

ArtiSynth applications frequently need to read in various kinds of data files, including mesh files (as discussed in Section 2.5.5), FEM mesh geometry (Section 6.2.2), probe data (Section 5.4.4), and custom application data.

Often these data files do not reside in an absolute location but instead in a location relative to the application’s class or source files. For example, it is common for applications to store geometric data in a subdirectory "geometry" located beneath the source directory. In order to access such files in a robust way, and ensure that the code does not break when the source tree is moved, it is useful to determine the application’s source (or class) directory at run time. ArtiSynth supplies several ways to conveniently handle this situation. First, the RootModel itself supplies the following methods:

The first method returns the path to the source directory of the root model, while the second returns the path to a file specified relative to the root model source directory. If the root model source directory cannot be found (see discussion at the end of this section) both methods return null. As a specific usage example, assume that we have an application model whose build() method needs to load in a mesh torus.obj from a subdirectory meshes located beneath the source directory. This could be done as follows:

A more general path finding utility is provided by maspack.util.PathFinder, which provides several static methods for locating source and class directories:

The “find” methods return a string path to the indicated class or source directory, while the “relative path” methods locate the class or source directory and append the additional path relpath. For all of these, the class is determined from classObj, either directly (if it is an instance of Class), by name (if it is a String), or otherwise by calling classObj.getClass(). When identifying a package by name, the name should be either a fully qualified class name, or a simple name that can be located with respect to the packages obtained via Package.getPackages(). For example, if we have a class whose fully qualified name is artisynth.models.test.Foo, then the following calls should all return the same result:

If the source directory for Foo happens to be /home/projects/src/artisynth/models/test, then

will return /home/projects/src/artisynth/models/test/geometry/mesh.obj.

When calling PathFinder methods from within the relevant class, one can specify this as the classObj argument.

With respect to the above example locating the file "meshes/torus.obj", the call to the root model method getSourceRelativePath() could be replaced with

Since this is assumed to be called from the root model’s build method, the “class” can be indicated by simply passing this to getSourceRelativePath().

As an alternative to placing data files in the source directory, one could place them in the class directory, and then use findClassDir() and getClassRelativePath(). If the data files were originally defined in the source directory, it will be necessary to copy them to the class directory. Some Java IDEs will perform this automatically.

The PathFinder methods work by climbing the class’s resource hierarchy. Source directories are assumed to be located relative to the parent of the root class directory, via one of the paths specified by getSourceRootPaths(). By default, this list includes "src", "source", and "bin". Additional paths can be added using addSourceRootPath(path), or the entire list can be set using setSourceRootPaths(paths).

At preset, source directories will not be found if the reference class is contained in a jar file.