Proper method to find user's My Documents folder on Windows with Java?

Question

For whatever reason, I sometimes need to find the current user's My Documents folder on Windows in a Java program to read some files. But as far as I can tell, there is no way to do it that isn't severely flawed.

The first wrong way: System.getProperty("user.home");
Why it won't work:

• It only returns the \username\ folder; I'd need to add "\Documents\" on to the end to get the Documents folder... and that only works in English.
• Sun bugs 6519127 and 4787931. Java finds the user home folder on Windows by reading a deprecated registry key* to find the Desktop then taking the parent; this method has multiple known problems that will easily cause a completely wrong folder to be returned. The bugs are 3.75 years and 8 years old with no fix.

The second wrong way: Using a registry-reading program to get the Personal folder of the user, which is My Documents (but i18n'd).
Why it won't work:
While it fixes the English-only problem, it's still using the same deprecated registry area, so the bugs still apply to it.

The deprecated registry key says to use a native call (SHGetKnownFolderPath) which I obviously can't do from Java.

The third wrong way:

JFileChooser fr = new JFileChooser();  
FileSystemView fw = fr.getFileSystemView();  
File documents = fw.getDefaultDirectory();

Why it won't work: It works great!
Except when it doesn't. While I had a program that used this open and running in the background, I opened a DirectX game (Fallout: New Vegas). The Java program immediately terminated with no stack trace. Always reproducible (for me on that game, and who knows what else). Couldn't find a Sun bug#.

So is there any method to find a user's Documents folder, on Windows, from Java, that doesn't have known problems?

(This is a nice big question.)

*(The key is "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders")

Answer 1

There's no pure java way to do it, but you could use the JNA wrapper over JNI to do it without having to write any native code yourself. There's a good example of how to get the Documents folder on Windows halfway down the responses at:

What is the best way to find the users home directory in Java?