How do I import an external jar file and a separate file as a command line argument in Netbeans?

Question

I'm having difficulty with my latest programming project. I have a program in Netbeans which relies upon an external library contained within a jar file. I am expected to use several imports to get the operations I need. While that's all fine and dandy, it also means I can't debug this code to make sure it works. I did see something on StackOverflow about doing a copy-pasta on the jar file into my code, but it uses so many commands and so much code that it would be more helpful to import the whole jar file, if possible.

How do I get Netbeans to recognize that I have an external jar file somewhere that it needs to read from in order to get its information?

Furthermore, I am expected to read in a file via the args[], and I am not sure how to read in command line arguments in Netbeans. How do I do this, and where am I expected to put the file to be read in?

Answer 1

I have figured out my issues and am going to answer this for future reference to anybody with this exact same problem. When you have a NetBeans project, you can open the project hierarchy and get a list of your source packages, test packages, libraries, and test libraries. The Libraries folder is where I needed the jar file.

I can right click on the libraries tab to add a jar/folder. Doing so gave me a file explorer to navigate to where I had my jar saved, and adding it fixed all the warnings for external library imports. The program now knows where to look for all the external libraries. Presumably, I'd have to repeat this if I ever moved the jar file.

As for adding the arguments, I found this under Run>Set Project Configuration>Customize. This brings up a window with the project properties. One of the text boxes will be for "Arguments," and filling this in with your commands will give you those commands as your Args[].