Hey All,

I'm having a little problem here.  I have a project that I'm working on
that involves a MySQL server database backend.  I'm having no problem
creating the database on the fly if it doesn't already exist and using it
once it's created.

My problem comes into play when I run the program for the first time.  I'm
wanting to have some kind of flag that lets me know that the database has
not yet been created, so that I can call my database creation routine.  I
started coding this project in a text editor and using the commandline
tools to compile and run the application and didn't have any problem.  I
simply used:

TruePath = getClass().getClassLoader().getResource (".").toString ();

to get the path to my main class.  However, my text editor started wigging
out on me as the project got larger and larger, and I figured out that I'm
an idiot and can't create the distributable JAR file on my without
corrupting my classes for some reason, so I've moved the project into
NetBeans IDE.

Since NetBeans puts the project into a JAR by default, I've run into
problems with my database creation flag.  Now, that line of code I placed
above no longer works as expected.  Instead, I keep getting
NullPointerException errors.  I've looked through the JavaDocs and have
searched online for a solution to this dilemma, but have not been able to
find anything.  I may, of course, be using the wrong search keywords on
Google and just not getting the results that I am looking for, but who
knows.

Does anyone here have any idea as to how I could go about either a)
placing a file (my db creation flag) into my JAR file at runtime, or b)
another idea that I could try for determining if the database already
exists or needs to be created?  Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Sean