Tag: java

JRebel and Maven Resource Filtering

Today, I was having an issue running an ear on a WLS application server. The build for the ear is a multi-module maven build. One of the modules contains a lot of properties files. Several of the property files have configuration information that changes based on environment. For example, a web service endpoint can change between environments.

Maven has is able to do property replacement as part of the packaging process.

# Web Service endpoint
hello_world_url=http://${ws.host}/HelloWorld?wsdl</pre>

Maven pom.xml

<properties>
  <ws.host>helloworld.com</ws.host>
</properties>
 
<build>
  <resources>
    <resource>
      <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
      <filtering>true</filtering>
    </resource>
  </resources>
 
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.7</version>
      <configuration>
        <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

The issue is that JRebel will default to using the properties in src/main/resources that contain the replacement string ${ws.host} which will not resolve to a valid url. This will result calls to the web service to fail.

One way to fix this is by excluding the properties files containing replacement strings from being looked at by JRebel. This can be done by editing the jrebel.xml. The syntax for defining the property files to be excluded follows ant style globbing.

Rebel.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<application xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.zeroturnaround.com"
             xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.zeroturnaround.com http://www.zeroturnaround.com/alderaan/rebel-2_0.xsd">
 
    <classpath>
        <dir name="/configuration/src/main/resources">
              <exclude name="config.properties"/>
              <exclude name="**/report_labels*.properties"/>
        </dir>
    </classpath>
 
</application>