Java EE Tutorial ant deploy error.

Question

I'm not really sure where this post belongs, but I thought I would throw it out there as an FYI to anyone using the ant command line tools for the Java EE Tutorial.
I have been playing around with the Java EE Tutorial and believe I may have found a bug with the war-ant.xml file. When running the deployment from the command line, the deploy portion of the build fails. The following is an example error message.
deploy:
[exec] Usage: deploy [--terse=false] [--echo=false] [--interactive=true] [-
-host localhost] [--port 4848|4849] [--secure | -s] [--user admin_user] [--passw
ordfile file_name] [--virtualservers virtual_servers] [--contextroot context_roo
t] [--force=true] [--precompilejsp=false] [--verify=false] [--name component_nam
e] [--upload=true] [--retrieve local_dirpath] [--dbvendorname dbvendorname] [--c
reatetables=true|false | --dropandcreatetables=true|false] [--uniquetablenames=t
rue|false] [--deploymentplan deployment_plan] [--enabled=true] [--generatermistu
bs=false] [--availabilityenabled=false] [--libraries jar_file[(pathseparator)jar
_file]*] [--target target(Default server)] filepath
[exec] CLI019 Invalid number of operands. Number of operands should be equ
al to 1.
deploy-url-message:
[echo] Application Deployed at: http://localhost:8080/bookstore1
BUILD FAILED
The root cause of the problem stems from the fact that the script basically calls a command line tool to deploy the war to the app server. If you examine the error output, all parameters are optional except the last one... filepath. This parameter is set in the war-ant.xml in the following line.
<property name="app.module" value="${build.dir}/${module.name}.war"/>
This line look innocuous at first but upon closer inspection, one notices that the path name refers to the build.dir. This is problematic because the build dir does not contain the war file. The build process puts the war file in the dist dir under the project root. So this line is incorrect. The following line offers the correct solution.
<property name="app.module" value="${dist.dir}/${module.name}.war"/>
By changing the line to use the dist.dir, which is where the file is located, the build script executes correctly. :)

Answer 1

As a follow-up to be clear, the app.module property is used in the deploy task of the app-server-ant.xml. It is the last argument of the argument list.
<target name="deploy" depends="tools,-pre-deploy"
description="deploys the application">
<fail unless="app.module" message="app.module must be set before invoking this target. Otherwise there is no application to deploy."/>
<fail unless="module.name" message="app.name must be set before invoking this target. Otherwise there is no application to deploy."/>
<condition property="app.url" value="http://${javaee.server.name}:${javaee.server.port}/${run.uri}">
<not>
<isset property="app.endpointuri"/>
</not>
</condition>
<property name="failonerror" value="true"/>
<exec executable="${asadmin}" failonerror="${failonerror}">
<arg line=" deploy "/>
<arg line=" --user ${javaee.server.username}" />
<arg line=" --passwordfile ${javaee.server.passwordfile}" />
<arg line=" --host ${javaee.server.name}" />
<arg line=" --port ${javaee.adminserver.port}" />
<arg line=" --name ${module.name}"/>
<arg line=" --force=true "/>
<arg line=" --upload=true "/>
<arg line=" --dbvendorname ${db.vendorname}"/>
<arg line="${app.module}" />
</exec>
<antcall target="deploy-url-message"/>
</target>