Naming Operations

Looking up an Object

To look up an object from the naming service, use the Context.lookup() method and pass it the name of the object you want to retrieve. Suppose there is an object in the naming service with the name "report.txt". To retrieve the object, you would write:

Object obj = ctx.lookup("report.txt");

The type of object that is returned by lookup() depends both on the underlying naming system and on the data associated with the object itself. A naming system can contain many different types of objects and a lookup of an object in different parts of the system might yield objects of different types. In our example, "report.txt" happens to be bound to a file (java.io.File). We can cast the result of lookup() to its target class.

For example, the following code looks up the object "report.txt" and casts it to File:

import java.io.File;
...
File f = (File)ctx.lookup("report.txt");

The complete example is in the file Lookup.java.