automatic GWT ClientBundles based on disk files

Question

I'm currently making good use of GWT's ClientBundles in my app. It works fine, but I have a large number of resources and it becomes tedious to manually create Java interfaces for each file:

@ClientBundle.Source("world_war_ii.txt")
public ExternalTextResource worldWarII();

@ClientBundle.Source("spain.txt")
public ExternalTextResource spain();

@ClientBundle.Source("france.txt")
public ExternalTextResource france();

I'd like to be able to (perhaps at compile time) dynamically list every *.txt file in a given directory, and then have run-time access to them, perhaps as an array ExternalTextResource[], rather than having to explicitly list them in my code. There may be hundreds of such resources, and enumerating them manually as code would be very painful and unmaintainable.

The ClientBundle documentation explicitly says that "to provide a file-system abstraction" is a non-goal, so unfortunately this seems to disallow what I'm trying to do.

What's the best way to deal with a large number of external resources that must be available at run-time? Would a generator help?

Answer 1

There's an automatic generator for CssResource - maybe you could look at its code and modify it to your needs?

Answer 2

I ended up following this advice: perform the file operations on the server, and then return a list of the file (meta)data via an RPC call.

This turns out to be fairly simple, and also allows me to return lightweight references (filenames) in the list, which I use to populate a Tree client-side; when the user clicks on a TreeItem the actual text contents are downloaded.