From the business prespective, here's the problem
We have a number of shared folders that people use, let's call it //shared/the/drive. However, our server might know this shared drive as some other name, perhaps //ir83pn3br8mwhonamesthesethingsanyway/the/drive since the networking group insists on having incredibly messed up server names. For most of the servers, it works just fine to use the simple name, but on this one, it's just not working right. So the bandaid for our problem is, in our code, to just be like "Oh you're using shared - we'll replace that with stupid name from networking.
Okay - now on to the more technical side of things:
I have a FileItem (Apache commons FileUpload module) object that might have a name //shared/the/drive/stuff/plans.doc. I need to create a FileItem that references //stupidname/the/drive/stuff/plans.doc. What should I do?
Should I edit the request object in the JSP? That sounds like a bad idea.
Should I use reflection to edit the FileItem object? That sounds like an even worse idea.
I'm not a front end guy (note which tags I have votes in... haha), really... more of a server dude... this just got dropped onto my plate. Is it possible to intercept the text box before it gets to the request, moving the change to the client side?
I can't possibly have been the first person to come across this problem. I'm not looking for code necessarily (would I mind? No I wouldn't.) but a general approach of both what will work, and/or how this sort of thing (changing what a user inputs) is handled in a 'best practicey' kind of way is most welcome.
Its not uncommon when dealing with distributed file systems to have a "fake path" which the user sees and deals with and a backend path which represent the actual node that allows you to manipulate the file in context of the request you receive.
Every page you hit on the web is not represented by the physical URL you type into the browser. Files live on CDNs, in CMS systems, are dynamically created out of databases ....whatever.
Theres no need to hack on any objects. You just wrap them with another object that contains their transient properties such as where Im going to access that file THIS time.