Is it possible to read a shapefile using geotools WITHOUT specifying the url of the file?

Question

I am creating a web application which will allow the upload of shape files for use later on in the program. I want to be able to read an uploaded shapefile into memory and extract some information from it without doing any explicit writing to the disk. The framework I am using (play-framework) automatically writes a temporary file to the disk when a file is uploaded, but it nicely handles the creation and deletion of said file for me. This file does not have any extension, however, so the traditional means of reading a shapefile via Geotools, like this

public void readInShpAndDoStuff(File the_upload){
     Map<String, Serializable> map = new HashMap<>();
     map.put( "url", the_upload.toURI().toURL() );

     DataStore dataStore = DataStoreFinder.getDataStore( map );
}

fails with an exception which states

NAME_OF_TMP_FILE_HERE is not one of the files types that is known to be associated with a shapefile

After looking at the source of Geotools I see that the file type is checked by looking at the file extension, and since this is a tmp file it has none. (Running file FILENAME shows that the OS recognizes this file as a shapefile).

So at long last my question is, is there a way to read in the shapefile without specifying the Url? Some function or constructor which takes a File object as the argument and doesn't rely on a path? Or is it too much trouble and I should just save a copy on the disk? The latter option is not preferable, since this will likely be operating on a VM server at some point and I don't want to deal with file system specific stuff.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

I can't see how this is going to work for you, a shapefile (despite it's name) is a group of 3 (or more) files which share a basename and have extensions of .shp, .dbf, .sbx (and usually .prj, .sbn, .fix, .qix etc).

Is there someway to make play write the extensions with the tempfile name?