Lack of modularity in Projects for EJB module

Question

Problem
For a project you have many enterprise bean components. In JDeveloper, currently, all the information like persistence-type,
resource-reference, etc reside in the ejb-jar.xml which is project specific.
(1) In the real-world, developers work on different modules with small individual work spaces with a small number of
enterprise components and web compoents with a CVS system to manage version of the source code
(2) The developer works on the source and check it in the CVS repository
(3) A packager will take components from the CVS repository and make a build for a customer according to the order
(Build-to-Order approach)
(4) In JDeveloper he might have to make the ejb-jar.xml again which is very cumbersome and timeconsuming
Suggestion
(1) The current system of maintaining ejb-jar.xml in the project is OK
(2) But the information in the ejb-jar xml ABOUT EACH EJB COMPONENT should also be maintained at the EJB component level like
a small ejb-jar.xml file specific to the one and only one component.
(3) Whenever the EJB component id edited, this modular ejb-jar.xml file will be edited too.
(4) Later while making the main ejb-jar xml for deployment, the info in these small modular xml files will be read, the main
project level ejb-jar xml will be prepared.
(5) The main project level ejb-jar.xml can also be prepared when the project is rebuilt (clean/force compile) and all te
small modular files are updated.
With regards
Amit

Answer 1

Hello,
Yes we do read every OTN message, though we often have some internal discussion before we post a reply.
In your specific situation, you could just break up the EJBs into different projects:
- Each EJB module in a separate project.
- Each EJB project builds a separate EJB JAR.
- When assembling the EAR, pull in as many EJB JAR files as necessary to support the WAR and other pieces.
JDeveloper already has support for the above setup. Starting with JDev 9.0.3, you can also establish dependencies between projects to make the classes built by one project visible to another project's classpath.
For us to implement a complete solution where small ejb-jar.xml files are merged into one large ejb-jar.xml file, we'd like to understand how you'd go about resolving conflicts in elements being merged:
- conflicting <method-permission>
- conflicting <container-transaction>
- conflicting <relationship-role>
- conflicting <env-entry>
- ... a number of other potential conflicts ...
We could do automatic merges when there are no conflicts. For the situations where there are conflicts, can you describe some solutions that you would consider acceptable?