Table of Content

• Cotta Convention
• File Operations
• File Systems
  • In-memory File System
  • Zip File System
  • FTP File System
  • File Systems for Testing
• Utilities
  • Classpath Support
  • Product Info Support
  • jBehave Support

Cotta Convention

Based on the “Thoughts behind Cotta”, Cotta is designed to match the common expectations for file operations:

• One entry point, TFileFactory, is strongly recommended, event though not enforced.
• TFile and TDirectory are totally different classes, even though they have similar methods
• Return values are used only for retrieving the object state. TIoException will be thrown whenever an operation fails.
• All parent of a directory or file will be created automatically, no questions asked.

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File Operations

Cotta offers three levels of flexibility for file operations to fit different development needs.

Save and Load

This is used simply for saving and loading text contents.

file.save("content");
ensure.that(file.load()).eq("content");

Or:

TFile file = ...
file.open(new LineProcessor() {
  public void process(String line) {
    System.out.println("Read line: " + line);
  }
});

Managed Resource

All input or output resources created will be tracked and closed automatically, even upon exception. This is similar to the design of Spring template and Ruby file I/O. All exceptions are wrapped in TIoException.

TFile file = ...
file.open(new FileIoProcessor() {
  public void process(FileIoResource io) throws IOException {
    PrintWriter printer = io.printWriter();
    printer.println("line one");
    printer.println("line two");
  }
});

I/O Factory

An I/O factory that does not more than allowing the creations of common I/O streams, reader/writer, printer with just one method call.

TFile file = ...
PrintWriter printer = file.io().printWriter();
try {
  printer.println("line one");
  printer.println("line two");
} catch (IOException e) {
  // ... exception handling code here
} finally {
  printer.close();
}

File Systems

PhysicalFileSystem

The wrapper of Java file operations. This is the default file system that TFileFactory uses.

InMemoryFileSystem

This is used mainly for testing by replacing the FileSystem. InMemoryFileSystem also treat the current directory as a unique location to prevent the bug that caused by the uncertainty of current working directory. You can also configure the InMemoryFileSystem to have different path separator or listing order

ZipFileSystem

A read-only file system that allows archive file browsing.

FtpFileSystem

A file system as a FTP client.

ControlledFileSystem and CatastrophicFileSystem

These are wrapper classes used to control the file system read and writer operations. CatastrophicFileSystem is specially designed to test the case of file system failure or file lock.

Utilities

Cotta also contains a small set of useful utilities.