PathMatchingResourcePatternResolver inconsistently throws IOException in case of non-existing resources [SPR-7365]

[spring-projects-issues]

Christian Cwienk opened SPR-7365 and commented

PathMatchingResourcePatternResolver behaves inconsistently (and imho in an unintuitive manner) as to the respect of throwing IOExceptions when resolving a given ant-style path pattern to concrete resources (tested with local filesystem):

In cases where no files are found (existing directory with no matching files), an empty array of Resource is returned (which is intuitive). If however, a part of the pathPattern does not exist (i.e. a directory does not exist), an IOException is being thrown unless the non-existing directory is specified after the first occurence of a wildcard, in which case an empty result array is returned.

imho, this is unintuitive and inconsistent for two reasons:

1. I'd expect a path pattern matcher to try match applying a best-effort strategy; in case nothing can be matched, I'd regard that as a normal outcome and would expect to get an empty result-array (which in some but not all cases actually happens)

2. Provided throwing an IOException in case part of the specified path does not exist made sense; then I'd expect this behaviour to be also applied for path parts after occurrences of wildcards (which is not the case).

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I've created a possible solution for this issue by subclassing the class in question (see attached files). However I'd very much appreciate it if this change could be incorporated into a future release of the Spring framework.

Best Regards,

Christian

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Affects: 2.5.6

Attachments:

• BestEffortPathMatchingResourcePatternResolver.java (2.96 kB)
• BestEffortPathMatchingResourceResolver_fixedMethodOnly.java (633 bytes)

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

Fortunately, this has already been fixed since Spring 3.0 RC2...

Juergen

[spring-projects-issues]

Christian Cwienk commented

Great, thanks a lot; yet another reason to finally change to a newer release =)