Cannot disable resteasy-jaxb-provider in favor of jackson2

[lostiniceland]

Hello everyone

We are migrating a legacy application from Portal to Wildfly 10 and we need to load some custom XML into our application.

The XML classes are annotated with JAXB and a resteasy-client with jackson-xml-provider is used to unmarshall the XMLs.

public class ResteasyJacksonXmlReader {

  public ResteasyJacksonXmlReader() {
  }

   T readEntity(String url, Class clazz) {

  JacksonXmlModule jacksonXmlModule = new JacksonXmlModule();
  jacksonXmlModule.setDefaultUseWrapper(false);
  JacksonJaxbXMLProvider provider = new JacksonJaxbXMLProvider();
  XmlMapper mapper = new XmlMapper(jacksonXmlModule);
   // Configure JAXB  
  JaxbAnnotationModule jaxbAnnotationModule = new JaxbAnnotationModule();
  mapper.registerModule(jaxbAnnotationModule);
   // configure as necessary   mapper.configure(DeserializationFeature.ACCEPT_EMPTY_STRING_AS_NULL_OBJECT, true);
  mapper.configure(DeserializationFeature.ACCEPT_EMPTY_ARRAY_AS_NULL_OBJECT, true);
  mapper.configure(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES, false);
  mapper.configure(DeserializationFeature.ACCEPT_SINGLE_VALUE_AS_ARRAY, true);
  mapper.configure(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_MISSING_CREATOR_PROPERTIES, false);
  provider.setMapper(mapper);

  ResteasyClient client = new ResteasyClientBuilder().build();
  client.register(provider);
  ResteasyWebTarget target = client.target(url);
  Response response = target.request().get();
   T result = response.readEntity(clazz);
   return result;
  }
}

This code works as expected as junit-test but when deploying this code, Wildfly always falls back to the com.sun.xml which fails

Caused by: org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.jaxb.JAXBUnmarshalException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.IllegalAnnotationsException: 1 counts of IllegalAnnotationExceptions

I've followed the instructions to manually enable jackson using a deployment-structure.xml (implicit activation does not work since there are no jax-rs annotations).

I disabled the resteasy-jaxb-provider because it has the dependency to com.sun.xml and enabled all modules that I need. There are two dependencies which are not provided by Wildfly, those are supplied within the ear

• jackson-jaxrs-xml-provider
• jackson-dataformat-xml

Even though I disabled the resteasy-jaxb-provider, the plugin is still used as you could see in the stacktrace.

What am I missing?

NOTE: We are deploying an EAR with multiple WARs

[lostiniceland]

As it turns out, the exclusion within the deployment was not enough. It was necessary to specify the exclusions for the sub-deployment.

Even stranger, the jackson2-provider must be specified in the global deployment (otherwise the WAR cannot link the classes).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jboss-deployment-structure>
  <ear-subdeployments-isolated>true</ear-subdeployments-isolated>
  <deployment>
   <exclusions>
   <module name="org.jboss.resteasy.resteasy-jackson-provider"/>
   <module name="org.jboss.resteasy.resteasy-jettison-provider"/>
   <module name="org.jboss.resteasy.resteasy-jaxb-provider"/>
   </exclusions>

   <dependencies>
   <module name="org.dom4j"/>
   <module name="org.jboss.resteasy.resteasy-jackson2-provider" services="import" />
   <module name="com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs.jackson-jaxrs-json-provider" />
   </dependencies>
  </deployment>
  <sub-deployment name="sparda-shop-0.0.1-SNAPHOT.war">
   <exclusions>
   <module name="org.jboss.resteasy.resteasy-jackson-provider"/>
   <module name="org.jboss.resteasy.resteasy-jettison-provider"/>
   <module name="org.jboss.resteasy.resteasy-jaxb-provider"/>
   </exclusions>
  </sub-deployment>
</jboss-deployment-structure>

Unfortunately this is not documented very well. We've just came accross some comment in the forums saying that exclusions work differently for EARs and WARs.