Loading resources using getClass().getResource()

Question

I am trying to load an image to use as an icon in my application. The appropriate method according to this tutorial is:

protected ImageIcon createImageIcon(String path, String description) 
{
    java.net.URL imgURL = getClass().getResource(path);
    if (imgURL != null) {
        return new ImageIcon(imgURL, description);
    } else {
        System.err.println("Couldn't find file: " + path);
        return null;
    }
}

So, I placed the location of the file, and passed it as a parameter to this function. This didn't work, i.e. imgURL was null. When I tried creating the ImageIcon by passing in the path explicitly:

ImageIcon icon  = new ImageIcon(path,"My Icon Image");

It worked great! So the application can pick up the image from an explicitly defined path, but didn't pick up the image using getResources(). In both cases, the value of the path variable is the same. Why wouldn't it work? How are resources found by the class loader?

Thanks.

Answer 1

getClass().getResource(path) loads resources from the classpath, not from a filesystem path.

Answer 2

You can ask a path in this format:

/package/path/to/the/resource.ext

Even the bytes for creating the classes in memory are found this way:

my.Class -> /my/Class.class

and getResource will give you an URL wich can be used to retrieve an InputStream.

But... I'd recommend using directly getClass().getResourceAsStream(...) with the same argument, because it returns directly the InputStream and don't have to worry about creating a (probably complex) URL object that has to know how to create the InputStream.

In short: try using getResourceAsStream and some constructor of ImageIcon that use an inputstream as argument.

Classloaders

Be careful if your app has many classloaders. If you have a simple standalone application (no servers or complex things) you shouldn't worry. I don't think it's the case provided ImageIcon was capable of finding it.

Edit: classpath

getResource is -as mattb says- for loading resources from the classpath (from your .jar or classpath directory). If you are bundling an app it's nice to have altogether, so you could include the icon file inside the jar of your app and obtain it this way.