Load freemarker template from classpath - spring-mvc

Question

I have a Resource in aSpring MVCapplication loaded from the classpath.
<bean id="myController" class="com.MyController">
<property name="myTemplate" value="classpath:myTemplate.txt"/>
</bean>
And I am trying to load it as a freemarker Template using this code:
private Resource myTemplate;
...
Configuration cfg = new Configuration();
cfg.setClassForTemplateLoading(this.getClass(), "/");
Template tpl = cfg.getTemplate(myResource.getFilename());
But I keep ending up in: java.io.FileNotFoundException: Template classpath:myTemplate.txt not found.
I tried implementing what wassuggested here however it doesn't seem to help.
The only hack I could findso far was to remove the "classpath: prefix from the filename String but I prefer not to do it
Any ideas...?

Answer 1

So what you are saying is that you don't want to remove "class:" from the template name, and according to this question you don't want to teach FreeMarker understanding it via a custom TemplateLoader either. I mean, if you bar these, what else could possibly solve this? I can only advice you to do the last; implement a custom TemplateLoader (either one that just removes the "class:" prefix then delegates to ClassTemplateLoader, or, even better, one that just delegates to a Spring ResourceLoader). That's how you configure FreeMarker to do what you want. It's not something extreme to do, implementing your own TemplateLoader.
Update: It might by useful to know that by default there's a mismatch between the FreeMarker template name syntax and Spring's resource name syntax. According the Spring syntax, you can write "classpath:foo.ftl" or "classpath:/foo.ftl". But FreeMarker assumes that the scheme part always ends with ://, and a lonely : or :/ is nothing special. So all these resource paths will be seen as relative paths, and so the current template directory will be prepended before them before the actual template resolution. To solve this, since FreeMarker 2.3.22, you can use Configuration.setTemplateNameFormat(TemplateNameFormat.DEFAULT_2_4_0) (template_name_format=DEFAULT_2_4_0 in Properties), which does consider : as scheme separator.