Directory Structure

Installation Directory

Current Configuration

Currently Argo contains definitions of certain directories. These are calculated at execution time and may be viewed on the Environment tab under the menu selection Edit -> Settings.

The first three values shown in the list (argo.root, argo.home, and argo.ext.dir) are calculated.

These are currently defined as follows:

• argo.root is the location that the Argo code is loaded from. This could be either a jar file or a directory.
• argo.home is the directory which contains argo.root.
• argo.ext.dir is a directory named ext in argo.home.

The following java fragment from org.argouml.application.modules.ModuleLoader calculates argo.root:

    String extForm = org.argouml.application.Main.class.getResource(Argo.ARGOINI).toExternalForm();
    argoRoot = extForm.substring(0, extForm.length()-Argo.ARGOINI.length());
            

Proposed Configuration

Rather than computing the value for argo.home, ArgoUML should determine that location from a system argument passed on the command line, or from a property file located in a "well-known" location.

These "well-known" locations would be selected from the directories provided by the Java run-time through the java.lang.System.getProperty(key) function. These are:

• java.home (Java installation directory)
• user.dir (User's current working directory)
• user.home (User's home directory)

argo.root would become obsolete, and its value would only be used internally if argo.home needed to be calculated because it was not otherwise provided.

The initialization process would then become:

1. Check if argo.home was provided on the command line.
2. If argo.home has not been set yet, attempt to retrieve its value from the property file ${java.home}/lib/argouml.initialization.properties.
3. If argo.home has not been set yet, attempt to retrieve its value from the property file ${user.home}/lib/argouml.initialization.properties.
4. If argo.home has not been set yet, calculate its value as currently being done, but without exposing argo.root.

This approach seems to provide sufficient flexibility and operating system independence. Additionally, the property file search approach should allow continued support for running ArgoUML under Java Web Start, which does not currently allow users to add command line arguments.

Developers (and other fools) could easily maintain multiple executable versions of Argo on their systems by using multiple startup scripts each pointing to a different argo.home.

The tag "developer_snapshot" contained in build.xml should be changed to "install", and determine the location of argo.home in a similar manner, but also checking the directory named by the ant built-in property basedir for the file argouml.initialization.properties.

Example of proposed installed directory structure

         /usr/share/argouml/bin
	 /usr/share/argouml/lib
         /usr/share/argouml/lib/ext