Jabref.xml in windows

Hello,

I run JabRef on windows. I hope the preference can be synced across my several windows machines. To this purpose I placed JabRef inside my dropbox and had memory stick mode enabled. I thought by this way the jabref.xml will be synced and loaded from different machines.

However, it seems the jabref.xml files were saved to wrong locations. The directories they were saved to seem weired to me because they are different in different machines and seem irrelevent to the JabRef location.

So where to assign the location of jabref.xml file? I tried to find in the setting but could not.

Thank you very much!

Hello @michael

Unfortunately, you cannot change the location of jabref.xml.

The location of jabref.xml is saved to what Java considers to be your “current working directory”. I am not too familiar with those parts of Java/JVM, so I can’t really tell you how that behaves on different operating systems/machines, I am essentially relying on the " Accessing Files" section of Path (Java SE 16 & JDK 16)

  1. How do you start JabRef?
  2. Are you using the portable version of JabRef?
  3. Which version of JabRef are you using?

Thank you for your help.

My JabRef is v5.2 portable. It is a folder containing lots of api-ms-*dll files. There is also a “JabRef.exe” inside the same folder. I start JabRef by directly run this exe file with full path specified (something like: “e:\Dropbox\Program\Green\JabRef\JabRef-5.2\JabRef.exe”).

After reading your post I assigned the startup path to JabRef.exe. It seems now the jabref.xml is created under the startup folder. I will report back after I tried it in different machines.

[update]
Confirmed working. Thanks!

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