You may be able to simply access a pre-arranged file path on the system. This is preferable since files added to the webapp directory might be lost or the webapp may not be unpacked depending on system configuration.
In our server, we define a system property set in the App Server's JVM which points to the "home directory" for our app's external data. Of course this requires modification of the App Server's configuration (-DAPP_HOME=... added to JVM_OPTS at startup), we do it mainly to ease testing of code run outside the context of an App Server.
You could just as easily retrieve a path from the servlet config:
<web-app>
<context-param>
<param-name>MyAppHome</param-name>
<param-value>/usr/share/myapp</param-value>
</context-param>
...
</web-app>
Then retrieve this path and use it as the base path to read the file supplied by the client.
public class MyAppConfig implements ServletContextListener {
// NOTE: static references are not a great idea, shown here for simplicity
static File appHome;
static File customerDataFile;
public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent e) {
appHome = new File(e.getServletContext().getInitParameter("MyAppHome"));
File customerDataFile = new File(appHome, "SuppliedFile.csv");
}
}
class DataProcessor {
public void processData() {
File dataFile = MyAppConfig.customerDataFile;
// ...
}
}
As I mentioned the most likely problem you'll encounter is security restrictions. Nothing guarantees webapps can ready any files above their webapp root. But there are generally simple methods for granting exceptions for specific paths to specific webapps.
Regardless of the code in which you then need to access this file, since you are running within a web application you are guaranteed this is initialized first, and can stash it's value somewhere convenient for the rest of your code to refer to, as in my example or better yet, just simply pass the path as a paramete to the code which needs it.