Reference external libraries from a SAR archive in JBoss AS 7

[andrei.serea]

Hello everyone!

Here is my problem: I want to deploy a special MXBean using a SAR archive. This should be easy, right?

Right, unless the bean references classes from an external library. When this happens, you want to pack the libraries in the SAR archive and add them to the classpath. Unfortunately I found no way of telling JBoss to add to the classpath these libraries.

Until now I have tried the following:
1. Simply add the libraries in the root of the archive.
2. Modify the Class-Path manifest entry to add the library name there
3. Added a jboss-structure.xml (copied from one of jboss5's sar archives from the /deploy dir)
4. Looked into jboss-deployment-structure.xml but really found no connection to what I am trying to do.

Whatever I tried I just couldn't convince JBoss to load the classes I'm referencing in my bean from the libraries packaged as jars inside the sar archive.

Any clues?

[andrei.serea]

In the meantime I managed to figure it out, thanks to the following articlehttp://middlewaremagic.com/jboss/?p=1081

The catch is simple: Just add the jboss-deployment-structure.xml file to the META-INF directory, with the following content:

<jboss-deployment-structure>
<deployment>
    <resources>
        <resource-root path="_path_to_archive_goes_here_" />
    </resources>
</deployment> 

That's it. Jboss will add the resource specified to the classpath of the deployed SAR archive. Hope this helps somebody.