I have a piece of code that tries to load an image file, but the image may or may not be present. I wrote my code this way so that I can change the appearance of my application just by dropping in image files (no code changes needed) but the loadImage() method puts out error messages when the file isn't present, even though it's not an error in this case.

I tried using the dataFile() method:

if (dataFile(imageName).exists()) {
 ...
}

but this doesn't work in an applet because the applet doesn't have enough permissions to call the exists() method.

I found a workaround, namely:

 boolean dataFileExists(String filename) {
   InputStream stream = createInput(filename);
   if (stream != null) {
     try {
       stream.close();
     }
     catch (IOException e) {
       e.printStackTrace();
     }
     return true;
   }
   return false;
 }

 if (dataFileExists(imageFile)) {
   ...
 }


Maybe this is useful for someone else too...