Parent Applications with Eclipse WTP

Question

Hello,
I have an question upon Eclipse WTP and Oracle 10.1.3.
In my project we have 4 EJB Modules which are in 4 EAR Files and are deployed on the Oracle 10.1.3 application server. One EAR is the parent for all the others. So I configured the server.xml like this:
<application name="Server" path="server.ear" />
<application name="Server2" parent="Server" path="server2.ear" />
<application name="Server3" parent="Server" path="server3.ear" />
<application name="Server4" parent="Server" path="server4.ear" />
What must I do to tell Eclipse WTP that the projects depend from "Server" when they are deployed by Eclipse to the application server?
Anyone any ideas?
Greetings
Marcel

Answer 1

The deployment task doesn't expose the parent attribute as an out of the box capability in WTP.
Under the covers it's invoking an Ant build script which uses the <oracle:deploy> Ant task. This Ant task does expose the parent attribute for the application being deployed.
I just mucked around with a little and have a 'sorta' solution.
The OC4J WTP plugin is defined in a file called: servers\oracle.10.1.3.serverdef.
This defines the details for an OC4J server definition.
What I did was to add a new property called application.parent.
     <property id="application.parent"
          label="%label.application.parent"
          type="string"
          context="server"
          default="default" />
And in plugin.properties added the label text
label.application.parent=Parent Application:
Then I modified the buildfiles\oracle.10.1.3.xml file and added the parent attribute to the deploy.j2ee.ear target:
<target name="deploy.j2ee.ear" depends="check.skip.ear.deploy"
unless="skip.deploy">
<antcall target="package.module.ear"/>
     <oracle:deploy
          deployerUri="${deployer.uri}"
          userId="${oc4j.admin.user}"
          password="${oc4j.admin.password}"
          file="${server.publish.dir}/${module.name}.ear"
          deploymentName="${module.name}"
          parent="${application.parent}"
          bindAllWebApps="${oc4j.bind.website}"/>
</target>
Now fire up eclipse.
What you should now see is when you define an OC4J 10.1.3 instance you can set the "Application Parent:" value and this is then supplied to application when it is deployed.
Voila!
Now the small usage wrinkle here is that this property is set per OC4J server instance definition -- so in your case, you'd need define 2 OC4J server instances. One server definition where the parent is the "default" application and use that deploy "Server" and another where the parent application is set to "Server" and use that to deploy Server 2-4.
If you want the changes I made to the file, then send me an email at steve dot button at oracle dot com and I'll send them to you.
I put a few screen shots and a bit of a discussion here:
http://buttso.blogspot.com/2006/11/hacking-eclipse-wtp-oc4j-to-add-parent.html
cheers
-steve-