[jboss-as7-dev] Detecting deployment location errors for xml files using a JEE schema

[Paul Robinson]

A common problem I see again and again is when people miss-spell the 
filenames of XML artefacts that live in the META-INF and WEB-INF 
directories of a JEE archive. I also see people (myself included) 
putting these artefacts in the wrong location, For example, putting the 
beans.xml file in the META-INF of a .war when it belongs in the WEB-INF. 
This can cause a big headache as it looks like you have created the 
right artifact, but it is not taking effect. It would be great if we 
could detect this type of thing and warn the developer at deploy time. 
There seems to be a move towards using marker files (beans.xml, 
faces-config.xml) to enable technologies, so this issue could become 
more prevalent.

One solution, I was thinking about, is to check the schema type of all 
the XML files in the META-INF and WEB-INF directories. For each schema 
that we recognize (http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence for example), 
we check that it's file name is correct and it is in a location where it 
will be processed.

Does this sound like a sensible thing for us to do?

Paul.

-- 
Paul Robinson
Web service transactions lead
paul.robinson at redhat.com

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