How to package an entity jar inside a WAR?

[nbhatia.bhatian.comcast.net]

I have a Seam application packaged as a WAR. Inside the WEB-INF/lib directory, I have a jar file that contains my persistent entities. What is the correct way to package the WAR so that my entities are picked up correctly. I have tried these two ways:

1) Put persistence.xml inside the jar containing the entities (under META-INF). This absolutely doesn't work.

2) Put persistence.xml under WEB-INF/classes/META-INF with a reference to the jar file containing the entities. This setup is at least recognizing the persistence.xml file, but it is not able to find the jar file (I get the message "Exploded jar does not exists"). I have tried various combinations such as:

    <jar-file>myentities.jar</jar-file>
    <jar-file>../myentities.jar</jar-file>
    <jar-file>/WEB-INF/lib/myentities.jar</jar-file>

Can someone please help me understand the correct way to do this?

Thanks.
Naresh

[luke.poldo.mailinator.com]

put your jar with everything inside YourProgect-ear/EarContent and modify application.xml like this:

  <module>
    <java>xstream-1.3.1.jar</java>
  </module>

it works for me...

[sarnac]

Hi,

I had the same problem with my WAR application. For reference, my app is JPA-based (Hibernate Entity Manager is the JPA provider) deployed as a WAR in JBoss. Anyway it seems that HEM is not able to resolve relative paths in jar-file tags when the application is deployed as a WAR.

I know of two ways to solve this:

1. Deploy your app as a EAR, like the above poster said.

2. If you wish to deploy as a WAR, instead of using jar-file in persistence.xml you can define all the entities that are in your jar explicitly:

<class>com.foo.Bar</class>
<class>...</class>

Mathieu

[nbhatia.bhatian.comcast.net]

Luke and Mathieu, thank you both for your help.

Just to set some context, I had the application configured as an EAR before and everything worked fine. The only issue was that I was not able to hot-deploy - hence the development cycle was very-very slow. After reading the reference manual, I decided to give JBoss Tools a try. Of course, it doesn't support hot deploying to an EAR, so I decided to switch to a WAR. Of course there are couple of glitches here too:

1) JBoss Tools puts all classes (front-end and entities) in the same project (probably because of the very problem we are discussing) - I don't like this from an architecture perspective.

2) I am loyal to Maven and JBoss Tools layout is not Maven friendly.

I really like Seam, but frustrated with it at this point - it's really coming in the way of productivity. Committer's, please guide if there is anyway out of this - without putting everything into one massive project.

Thanks.
Naresh

[serkan.s.eskici.online.nl]

If you're using Maven you can unpackage your entity.jar from WEB-INF/lib to WEB-INF/classes and this should solve the problem.

See http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/examples/unpacking-artifacts.html.

[mana.hotmana76.gmail.com]

Well, it is not directly bug of Seam or JBoss Tools but JPA provider - Hibernate EntityManager - look at HHH-4161.

AFAIK JBoss Tools for WAR projects creates special classpath entries for entities and other action classes in Web project. That is because hot-deploy doesn't work for entities.

You should find there src/main and src/hot directories.

Anyway if you place your persistence descriptor like WAR/WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/persistence.xml and your entity classes in WAR/WEB-INF/classes/ it should work.

According to Maven, If you know M2eclipse plugins, you can use it together with JBoss Tools. Some tutorial is at http://relation.to/Bloggers/UsingMavenWithJBossTools.