How to deal with relative path in Junits between Maven and Intellij

Question

I have a maven project with a module

/myProject
pom.xml
    /myModule
    pom.xml
       /foo
       bar.txt

Consider a Junit in myModule which needs to open bar.txt, with maven the basedir is the module directory.

So to open the file bar.txt :

  new File("foo/bar.txt")

This works well when you execute mvn test BUT when you launch the same junit in intellij, it fails because Intellij sets the basedir in the project directory, not the module directory.

Intellij tries to open myProject/foo/bar.txt instead of myProject/myModule/foo/bar.txt

Is there a way to deal with that ?

Answer 1

If you want to keep your code, you can try to change the working directory in the run/debug configuration (first entry in the combo box giving access to what you want to run) Set this to your module root. But prefer the other suggested approach:

ClassLoader.getSystemResourceAsStream(youPath) 

Or my preferred:

getClass.getResource(youPath)

or

getClass.getResourceAsStream(youPath)

A leading '/' in path indicates the working dir of your project, while no '/' indicates a relative dir to current class.

I use this last solution for my tests: I put my test data resources at the same package level as the test source, or in a subdir to avoid too messy package.

This way I can do a simple call without complicated path and without having to deal with working directory:

project-root  
  - module A  
    - src  
      - test
        - rootfile.txt  
        - my-complicated-package-naming-root
          - mypackage
            - Test.java
            - testResource.xml  

I can get the files this way:

final URL rootfile= Test.class.getResource("/rootfile.txt");
final URL testResource= Test.class.getResource("testResource.xml");