A problem with java Object Streams while writing to file

Question

Hi, I am trying to write an Object of kind "HashMap" to a file & recover it when my program run again. But I faced with an EOFException when I try to read that object and the Object is not read from the file. I use the flush() & close() methods when I wrote the object for the FileOutputStream & ObjectOutputStream. Also I create OutputStream & InputStream together for my file. here is my code:

DataOutputStream outToFile;
DataInputStream inFromFile;

ObjectOutputStream writeTableToFile;
ObjectInputStream readTableFromFile;
File tableFile;

public DNS(){
    try {
        tableFile = new File("table.txt");
        outToFile = new DataOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(tableFile) );
        writeTableToFile = new ObjectOutputStream(outToFile);

        inFromFile = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream(tableFile));
        readTableFromFile = new ObjectInputStream(inFromFile);
        HashMap table2 = (HashMap) readTableFromFile.readObject();
        if (table2 == null)
            table=new HashMap(100);
        else
            table = table2;
    } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }catch(EOFException e){
        table=new HashMap(100);
    }
    catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

}

and here is code for writing object:

            table.put(NameField.getText(), IPField.getText());
            try {
                //writeTableToFile.reset();
                writeTableToFile.writeObject(table);
                writeTableToFile.flush();
            } catch (IOException e1) {
                e1.printStackTrace();
            }

Regards, sajad

Answer 1

EOFException means that the file is incomplete. So it's either not flush()ed or not close()ed or an exception is swallowed somewhere.

Answer 2

The file seems to be incomplete. When I look at your code, you're creating the file table.txt and try to read it immediately afterwards.

This ctor:

new FileOutputStream(tableFile)

will overwrite the file. If your read it afterwards, it will be empty (except the header information from the OOS)