Viewing images not within webapp

[mpegjohn]

Hi,
I am very new to Spring. I am starting a web MVC project to display video shots as thumbnails.
These are all stored within a repository, not within the webapp domain, eg on the filesystem /repo/thumbnails/.....

I would like a user to be able to stipulate where the repo path is, via a form, and then use that path to retrieve the images.

I have tried using the <mvc:resources> tag in the config, but I still am unable to get to any external file.

Do I need to setup the classpath to include this directory. If so how do I enable this to be programatically changed?

There must be an easy way to do this, I just can't get it to work.

Can someone please give me a simple example please.

[mpegjohn]

OK I have worked it out:
In server-context.xml I now have:
<resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/,file:/home/john/temp_jpgs/" />

This will allow the images inside the file system directory /home/john/temp_jpgs/ to be accessed using the /resources/ map.

So in my jsp:

<%@ taglib uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags" prefix="s" %>
.....
<s:url value="${item['imagePath']}" var="thumb_uri" htmlEscape="true" />
<img src="${thumb_uri}" />

And in the controller I use the following code to create a List of hashes:

List<Map<String, String>> listOfMaps = new ArrayList<Map<String, String>>();
Map<String,String> imageMap = new HashMap<String,String>();

imageMap.put("imagePath", "/resources/image[1].jpg");
imageMap.put("imageTime", "00:00:01");

listOfMaps.add(imageMap);

imageMap = new HashMap<String,String>();


imageMap.put("imagePath", "/resources/image[2].jpg");
imageMap.put("imageTime", "00:00:02");
listOfMaps.add(imageMap);

model.addAttribute("thumbs", listOfMaps);

Seems to work fine.

[johny brawn]

Helli friends,

Thanks for sharing this with us.