Opening PDF only works in netbeans

Question

I have written a program that creates PDF documents. After creating, the PDF's must be opened so it can be printen.

i have the following code, but it only works if i launch from netbeans. Could anyone give me some pointers?

 public void openPDF()
    {
        try {
            System.out.println("Opening PDF");
            File file = new File(pdfPath+pdfName);
            String absolutePDFpath = file.getAbsolutePath().replace(""+(char)92,""+(char)92+(char)9);
            System.out.println("Path = "+absolutePDFpath);
            Runtime.getRuntime().exec("rundll32 url.dll,FileProtocolHandler " + absolutePDFpath);
        } 
        catch (IOException ex) 
        {
            JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Er is een fout opgetreden tijdens het openen van het PDF"
                    + " document\nFoutcode: 0xFF05");
            Logger.getLogger(PrintJob.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        }

Answer 1

See Desktop.open(File) for a way to open a PDF across different platforms. Something like this..

File file = new File(pdfPath+pdfName);
Desktop.getDesktop().open(file);

---

If the app. needs to support Java 1.5 or earlier (before Desktop was available), stick with exec() , but implement all the recommendations of When Runtime.exec() won't .

There are a number of things that using a Process requires the programmer to do, for reliable running. That code does none of them.

Answer 2

Probably your code doesn't work because you don't specify environment variables. It should be something like this:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("command to execute", env[]);