We have several different types of non-archive artifacts which need to be supported - dtds, service.xml descriptors, etc. These need to be included in the release structure outside of any archive.

<resource id="exception-processor"/>

<artifactdef artifact="sqlexception-service.xml">
 <include input="exception-processor">
 <include pattern="sqlexception-service.xml">
 </include>
</artifactdef>

I think we can make this less verbose. If I were following the existing design, I think I would have to copy it to somewhere like output/lib, assuming I had the following:

<artifacttype id="xml" outputtype="lib"/>

and then in the build targetdef:

<xml>
 <mkdir dir="@{parentDir}"/>
 <copy todir="@{parentDir}">
 <filesets/>
 </copy>
 </xml>

So the toplevel build can find the file in output/lib instead of output/resources/exception-processor.

 <artifact id="sqlexception-service.xml"/>

I suppose the downsides to this approach are:

1. No grouping of many artifacts, so each file must be listed as a seperate artifact element. I might like to have an artifact like server.dtds that allows me to treat *.dtd as a group.
2. We are "unnecissarily" copying files from output/resources/something to output/lib.