Loading freemarker templates folder inside .jar

Question

I am using freemarker templates in my application

Before deploying my application to a jar file, all I needed to do in order to load my templates was this: cfg.setDirectoryForTemplateLoading(new File("templates"));

Which loaded all templates from the template folder I created inside my project.

Now, after moving to maven and deploying my application to an executable jar. The application cannot find this folder anymore (I have checked inside the .jar file and the "templates" folder is deployed right in the root directory)

I have tried everything I know, but with no luck.

How exactly am I supposed to load all my templates now? (I assume that if I put the folder outside the .jar file but in the same directory it will work. but that's not what i want.)

Thanks.

Answer 1

Have a look at

void setClassForTemplateLoading(Class cl, String prefix); 

...in the FreeMarker manual chapter about template loading.

Example:

cfg.setClassForTemplateLoading(this.getClass(), "/templates"); 

...if your templates is located in the templates package relative to the root of the current class.

Answer 2

Configuration cfg;
private Template template;  
    {
        cfg=new Configuration(); 
        try {
            cfg.setClassForTemplateLoading(this.getClass(), "/templates");
            template = cfg.getTemplate("template.ftl");
}

This worked perfectly for me. Here my templates folder contains template.ftl which is under src/main/resources package.

Answer 3

An alternative to the mentioned

cfg.setClassForTemplateLoading(this.getClass(), "/templates");

is

TemplateLoader ldr = new ClassTemplateLoader(classLoader, basePackagePath);
cfg.setTemplateLoader(ldr);

which can be useful if you need to load stuff from other jars than the one your ftl processor belongs to.

Calls to cfg.getTemplate(..) will then perhaps be more convenient as they only need the path to the ftl relative to basePackagePath