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

[Jason T. Greene]

On 2/24/12 8:36 AM, Paul Robinson wrote:
> 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?

I think the idea is good, but looking at the content of all xml files 
would slow down deployment time, especially for large complex nested 
deployments. So if we did this as part of deployment it would be more 
efficient to do it based on file name matching. Common misspellings 
could be checked for using a static map. So I would still prefer 
extensive checking like this to be an optional deployment tool/maven 
task. If however someone comes up with a patch which is able to 
demonstrate no significant delay, we would certain reconsider.

-- 
Jason T. Greene
JBoss AS Lead / EAP Platform Architect
JBoss, a division of Red Hat