Textscreen in Codename One, how to read text file?

Question

I want to add a help screen to my Codename One App. As the text is longer as other strings, I would like put it in a separate file and add it to the app-package.

How do I do this? Where do I put the text file, and how can I easily read it in one go into a string?

(I already know how to put the string into a text area inside a form)

Answer 1

In the Codename One Designer go to the data section and add a file.

You can just add the text there and fetch it using myResFile.getData("name");.

You can also store the file within the src directory and get it using Display.getInstance().getResourceAsStream("/filename.txt");

Answer 2

I prefer to have the text file in the filesystem instead of the resource editor, because I can just edit the text with the IDE. The method getResourceAsStream is the first part of the solution. The second part is to load the text in one go. There was no support for this in J2ME, you needed to read, handle buffers etc. yourself. Fortunately there is a utility method in codename one. So my working method now looks like this:

    final String HelpTextFile = "/helptext.txt";
    ...
    InputStream in = Display.getInstance().getResourceAsStream(
            Form.class, HelpTextFile);
    if (in != null){
        try {
            text = com.codename1.io.Util.readToString(in);
            in.close();
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            System.out.println(ex);
            text = "Read Error";
        }
    }

Answer 3

The following code worked for me.

//Gets a file system storage instance
FileSystemStorage inst = FileSystemStorage.getInstance();
//Gets CN1 home`
final String homePath = inst.getAppHomePath();
final char sep = inst.getFileSystemSeparator();
// Getting input stream of the file
InputStream is = inst.openInputStream(homePath + sep + "MyText.txt");
// CN1 Util class, readInputStream() returns byte array
byte[] b = Util.readInputStream(is);
String myString = new String(b);