Different handling in PathEditor in Servlet Context for existing and non-existing paths [SPR-15256]

[spring-projects-issues]

Holger Stenzhorn opened SPR-15256 and commented

Following the advice from from Juergen Hoeller in #19117, I have the code below "living" in a class of a webapp:

@Value("x") Path a;
@Value("y") Path b;
@Value("#{servletContext.getRealPath('x')}") Path c;
@Value("#{servletContext.getRealPath('y')}") Path d;

It is important to note that the directory x actually exists but y does not exist.

Now I have the following test method:

private void test() {
  Stream.of(a, b, c, d).forEach(p -> System.out.format("%s\n%s\n\n", p, p.toAbsolutePath()));
}

This method returns:

/Users/holger/Developer/test/out/artifacts/test_Web_exploded/x
/Users/holger/Developer/test/out/artifacts/test_Web_exploded/x

y
/usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/8.5.11/libexec/bin/y

/Users/holger/Developer/test/out/artifacts/test_Web_exploded/x
/Users/holger/Developer/test/out/artifacts/test_Web_exploded/x

/Users/holger/Developer/test/out/artifacts/test_Web_exploded/y
/Users/holger/Developer/test/out/artifacts/test_Web_exploded/y

So for existing paths there is no difference as can be seen from the output for a and c.
But for non-existing paths there is a difference as the output for b and d shows.

I can see that the documentation for PathEditor says this:

As a fallback, a path will be resolved in the file system via Paths#get(String) if no existing context-relative resource could be found.

So it seems to me that the above difference might be intentional...

(Note: My specific use case is that I want to specify with the above "method" a path where Lucene creates its index and that directory does not necessarily have to exist beforehand.)

---

Affects: 4.3.6

Issue Links:

• PathEditor returns wrong result for absolute path in servletContext.getRealPath(...) [SPR-14549] #19117 PathEditor returns wrong result for absolute path in servletContext.getRealPath(...)

[snicoll]

The handling looks consistent to me now. That above outputs the following for me:

x
/Users/snicoll/workspace/temp/demo-web/x

y
/Users/snicoll/workspace/temp/demo-web/y

/private/var/folders/hn/7bzmb6w56w3550705qmk6m4m0000gn/T/tomcat-docbase.8080.3737663102758843393/x
/private/var/folders/hn/7bzmb6w56w3550705qmk6m4m0000gn/T/tomcat-docbase.8080.3737663102758843393/x

/private/var/folders/hn/7bzmb6w56w3550705qmk6m4m0000gn/T/tomcat-docbase.8080.3737663102758843393/y
/private/var/folders/hn/7bzmb6w56w3550705qmk6m4m0000gn/T/tomcat-docbase.8080.3737663102758843393/y

Where /Users/snicoll/workspace/temp/demo-web/x exists while /Users/snicoll/workspace/temp/demo-web/y does not.