Where in the IFS should I download poi-3.6 to?

[GlennGundermann]

Hi there,

I found an old article that says to download files to: /QIBM/UserData/Java400/ext but I don't see any old poi files in this folder here at my work.

I do see a folder /poi that contains the following files:
poi-contrib-3.0.1-FINAL-20070705.jar
poi-scratchpad-3.0.1-FINAL-20070705.jar
poi-3.0.1-FINAL-20070705.jar

My question is where should I have my files and in what structure?
I.E. Should I have a folder: /QIBM/UserData/Java400/ext/poi-3.6 and then have all the files under this folder?
or should I place the new files also in the /poi folder mixing them with the 3.0 files?

Tks,
Glenn Gundermann

[T.Snyder]

Hi Glenn,

It's a matter of preference. I prefer to not put my jar files in the ext folder because IBM puts some stuff in here and I'd rather put my files in their own place, which makes it easier with backup and recovery and upgrades.

As far as which folder, I usually put my jar files in a folder named /Public/Java and I use the class path environment variable to point to the jar files contained in that folder, like this:
<code><b>
localPath = '/Public/Java/Excel_POI'
+ '/poi-3.0.2-FINAL-20080204.jar';
commandString = 'ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(CLASSPATH) '
+ 'VALUE(''.:'
+ %TRIM(localPath)
+ ''') REPLACE(*YES)';
monitor;
ExecuteCommand(%trim(commandString):%len(%trim(com mandString)));
on-error;
displayBytes = 'ERROR occurred on Class Path!';
DSPLY displayBytes;
endmon;
</b></code>

You can see here that the class path is pointed directly to the jar file; not the folder. So, you could have multiple jar file versions and you could change the path, compile into a test library and test away.

Have a great day,
Tom