[m2e-users] m2e-wtp, war overlays and shared resources

["Thorsten Heit" <thorsten.heit@xxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm in the process of creating Maven builds for a
few applications. These applications use Ant build scripts to create WAR
and EAR files.


Initial situation:

* All source code is stored in our Subversion repository.
* Each application depends on several internal projects
P1, P2, ... that all have a non-Maven-like structure.
* Most, but not all of them not only contain Java
code, but also web resources (HTML, _javascript_, XSL, ...) that have to
be placed directly under "/" or under "/WEB-INF" in
the resulting application WAR(s).



Actual situation:

* For each internal project P that contains only Java
code I have created a new Maven project mvn-P using Maven conventions and
directory layout; Java code is referenced under src/main/java via svn:externals.
* For each project Q that contains both Java sources
and resource files, I have created two Maven projects mvn-Q and mvn-Q-resources;
as above Java code and resources are referenced via svn:externals. The
mvn-Q-resources project is of type pom and uses the assembly plugin to
create a zip archive containing the resources; i.e. builds an artifact
named mvn-Q-resources-<version>-zip.zip


For one of the WAR and EAR projects I created a multi-module
Maven project to build the same WAR and EAR via Maven as the legacy Ant
script. The structure is basically the following:

app-main
+- app-jar
   +- mvn-p
   \- mvn-q
+- app-war
   +- app-jar
   \- mvn-q-resources
+- app-ear
   \- app-war


The app-war pom.xml contains the following:

<plugins>
  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
      <!-- web resources -->
      <overlays>
        <overlay>
          <groupId>mygroup</groupId>
          <artifactId>mvn-Q-resources</artifactId>
          <type>zip</type>
          <classifier>zip</classifier>
          <targetPath>/WEB-INF</targetPath>
          <includes>
            <include>/xsl/**</include>
          </includes>
        </overlay>
        ...
      </overlays>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>
  ...
</plugins>

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>mygroup</groupId>
    <artifactId>mvn-Q-resources</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <type>zip</type>
    <classifier>zip</classifier>
    <scope>runtime</scope>
  </dependency>
  ...
</dependencies>

So far, this works pretty fine using command-line
Maven.



The problem:

My Eclipse workspace contains all necessary projects,
i.e. mvn-P, mvn-Q, mvn-Q-resources, app-main, app-jar, app-war and app-ear.
In the server view I created a new instance using a locally installed Tomcat.
After adding app-war to it I see all the project's jar dependencies in
the view. But:
Although I can start the server and debug in the referenced
dependencies, the WAR application doesn't run correctly because the referenced
resources are not available, i.e. everything I added to m-war-p via overlays/overlay.

I'm using the following:

* Eclipse Mars 4.5 (Build id: I20150203-1300)
* Java EE Developer Tools 3.7.0.v201501282120
* m2e 1.6.0.20150220-1952
* m2e-wtp 1.2.0.20150212-1712
* Tomcat v8.0.20
* Java 7u76

Do you have any hints on how to solve this?
Do I need to change something?
Is m-assembly-p the right way to create an archive
containing resources that are shared between other applications?



Regards

Thorsten