Properties has become legacy. Preferences class is preferred to Properties.
A node in a hierarchical collection of preference data. This class allows applications to store and retrieve user and system preference and configuration data. This data is stored persistently in an implementation-dependent backing store. Typical implementations include flat files, OS-specific registries, directory servers and SQL databases. The user of this class needn't be concerned with details of the backing store.
Unlike properties which are String based key-value pairs, The Preferences
class has several methods used to get and put primitive data in the Preferences data store. We can use only the following types of data:
- String
- boolean
- double
- float
- int
- long
- byte array
To load the the properties file, either you can provide absolute path Or use getResourceAsStream()
if the properties file is present in your classpath.
package com.mypack.test;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.util.prefs.Preferences;
public class PreferencesExample {
public static void main(String args[]) throws FileNotFoundException {
Preferences ps = Preferences.userNodeForPackage(PreferencesExample.class);
// Load file object
File fileObj = new File("d:\\data.xml");
try {
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(fileObj);
ps.importPreferences(fis);
System.out.println("Prefereces:"+ps);
System.out.println("Get property1:"+ps.getInt("property1",10));
} catch (Exception err) {
err.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
xml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE preferences SYSTEM 'http://java.sun.com/dtd/preferences.dtd'>
<preferences EXTERNAL_XML_VERSION="1.0">
<root type="user">
<map />
<node name="com">
<map />
<node name="mypack">
<map />
<node name="test">
<map>
<entry key="property1" value="80" />
<entry key="property2" value="Red" />
</map>
</node>
</node>
</node>
</root>
</preferences>
Have a look at this article on internals of preferences store