Accessing resources in Grails Plugin - grails

Question

I have a Grails Plugin called 'foo' that uses another Grails Plugin called 'common'.
grails.plugin.location.'common' = "../common"
The 'common' plugin contains domain classes, as well as resource files (.properties files, xml templates, ...). These files are all located in subfolders in common/grails-app/conf/.
There's one class that implements NamespaceContext in my 'common' plugin that uses these files in order to function properly.
public class MyNamespaceContext implements NamespaceContext {
private Map<String, String> namespaces;
public MyNamespaceContext() {
final String XML_NAMESPACES_FILE = "grails-app/conf/xml/xmlNamespaces.properties";
try {
Properties xmlNamespaces = new Properties();
xmlNamespaces.load(new FileReader(XML_NAMESPACES_FILE));
namespaces = new HashMap<String, String>((Map) xmlNamespaces);
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
throw new RuntimeException("XML namespaces file '" + XML_NAMESPACES_FILE + "' cannot be found");
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new RuntimeException("IOException");
}
}
...
}
This class is used in several classes, also located in 'common' that form my domain model, implemented as xml decorators.
public class UserXmlDecorator implements User {
private Document xmlDocument;
private XPath xPath;
private final String rawXml;
public UserXmlDecorator(String rawXml) {
this.rawXml = rawXml;
this.xmlDocument = XmlDocumentFactory.INSTANCE.buildXmlDocumentInUTF8(rawXml);
this.xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
xPath.setNamespaceContext(new MyNamespaceContext());
}
public String getUserName() {
try {
XPathExpression userNameXPathExpr = xPath.compile("...");
String userName = userNameXPathExpr.evaluate(appendixBXmlDocument);
return userName;
} catch (XPathExpressionException e) {
throw new RuntimeException();
}
}
public String getAge() {
try {
XPathExpression ageXPathExpr = xPath.compile("...");
String age = ageXPathExpr.evaluate(appendixBXmlDocument);
return age;
} catch (XPathExpressionException e) {
throw new RuntimeException();
}
}
When creating these decorators in my Grails Plugin 'foo', I get a FileNotFound exception, because it is looking for the template in foo/grails-app/conf/xml/xmlNamespaces.properties, instead of common/grails-app/conf/xml/xmlNamespaces.properties.
I've read
Grails: How to reference a resource located inside an installed plugin? but this could not help me.
Any idea how I can solve this?

Answer 1

Solved this by putting the .properties file in the classpath instead of the conf/ directory and then using the classloader to lod the resource.
xmlNamespaces.load(this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream(XML_NAMESPACES_FILE));