iText image in java servlet

Question

I\'m doing the letter generation with iText (pdf/rtf) in java servlet and got a problem with accessing images. The images are in the WebContent/images folder. When I run it

Answer 1

You should never use relative paths in java.io stuff. You will be dependent on the current working directory which is in no way controllable in case of a webapplication. Always use absolute disk file system paths. Thus, c:/full/path/to/file.ext.

You can use ServletContext#getRealPath() to convert a relative web path to an absolute disk file system path. The relative web path is rooted on the public webcontent folder which is in your case thus /WebContent. So, you need to replace the first line of above code by:

String relativeWebPath = "/images/letterHead.jpg";
String absoluteDiskPath = getServletContext().getRealPath(relativeWebPath);
Image imghead = Image.getInstance(absoluteDiskPath);
// ...