Question

Get application name.

Asked by: PaulCaswell

Hi All,

I would like to work out a way of reliably getting the name of the application from inside a utility package.

In package 'utils' I need a method getAppName that returns the name of the app. This will be used for naming folders and log files etc. This naming will be done by other tools in the utils package. I have the enclosed code that collects the name of the jar but it wont work under debug where the utilities package is accessed through source rather than jar.

One technique I have seen is to create an exception, pull out a stack trace from it and walk through it. Doing this in a static object would allow me to get in at <Init> time but this doesn't seem to work. The app name does not appear anywhere reliably.

Thanks in advance.

Paul

public static String getAppName() {
	// Assume we are in the same jar as the main class.
	// We are likely to be as these utils should be packaged in the jar.
	URL url = ClassUtils.getLocation(VersionUtils.class);
	System.out.println("URL: "+url.toString());
	File file = new File(url.getFile());
	String name = file.getName();
	System.out.println("Name: "+name);
	if ( name.toLowerCase().endsWith(".jar") ) {
	    name = name.substring(0, ".jar".length());
	} else {
	    if ( name.toLowerCase().equals("classes") ) {
		// Its source.
	    }
	}
	System.out.println("AppName: "+name);
	return name;
    }

                                  
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Asked On
2008-02-21 at 05:26:11ID23180965
Tags

Java

Topic

Java Programming Language

Participating Experts
2
Points
250
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: Bart_CrPosted on 2008-02-21 at 05:42:34ID: 20947587

When running on a Sun VM you could use the undocument VMSupport class:

String cmd = sun.misc.VMSupport.getAgentProperties().getProperty("sun.java.command");

This will give you the actual java command used to launch the application.

 

by: cmalakarPosted on 2008-02-21 at 06:13:41ID: 20947813

Will this be useful..

 ThreadMXBean  temp = ManagementFactory.getThreadMXBean();
 ThreadInfo t = temp.getThreadInfo(1, Integer.MAX_VALUE);
 System.out.println("Name: " + t.getThreadName());
 StackTraceElement st[] = t.getStackTrace();
 System.out.println("Main Class Name: " + st[st.length - 1].getClassName());

This prints the Main Class Name..

This can be executed only in jdk 1.6

 

by: PaulCaswellPosted on 2008-02-21 at 06:20:56ID: 20947909

Thanks both,

Sorry, not running under sun VM.

Sorry, need to be JVM 1.5 compatible and, if possible, 1.4.

Any more ideas?

Paul

 

by: cmalakarPosted on 2008-02-21 at 06:27:59ID: 20947983

Sorry.. My code works from 1.5 onwards..

 

by: PaulCaswellPosted on 2008-02-21 at 07:14:12ID: 20948417

cmalakar,

Perfect!

I am guessing this grabs a stack crawl of the current thread and pulls the name of the class out of the bottom of the stack. Cute. :)

Paul

 

by: cmalakarPosted on 2008-02-21 at 21:36:55ID: 20954927

>> I am guessing this grabs a stack crawl of the current thread

It is not actually current thread, It is the stack trace of the *main* thread..

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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