Bastion

Permanent Article Link

In WebLogicMBeanMaker and Maven I wrote about how to use WebLogicMBeanMaker 8.1 in a Maven 2 build. Even though WebLogicMBeanMaker is documented as a two-step process, the Maven build process allowed us to skip the second step by relying upon Maven’s packaging mechanism. All was well at the time…

Of course, if you have a security provider in WebLogic 8.1 you’re probably going to migrate it to WebLogic 9 or 10 eventually, right? Unfortunately, the old build process is no longer sufficient and you’ll have to make some changes. First, I’ll describe the problem and then show the solution.

Home is where WebLogic is

If you use a POM similar to the one presented in WebLogicMBeanMaker and Maven but with WebLogic 9+ dependencies (note that wlManagement.jar changed to wlManagementMBean.jar in WLS 9), you’ll get the following error:

[java] Compiling inline
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: : Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:164)
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       at weblogic.management.commo.BeanGenDriver.getManagementTempDir(BeanGenDriver.java:76)
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       at weblogic.management.commo.BeanGenDriver.main(BeanGenDriver.java:118)
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: : Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: error in finding weblogic.Home
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       at weblogic.Home.getInstance(Home.java:90)
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       at weblogic.Home.getPath(Home.java:96)
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       at weblogic.management.bootstrap.BootStrap.init(BootStrap.java:108)
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       at weblogic.management.bootstrap.BootStrap.(BootStrap.java:87)
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: :       … 4 more
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: : Stopped draining WLMaker-SubProcess:
[java] BeanGen code generation failed
[java] WLMaker-SubProcess: : Stopped draining WLMaker-SubProcess:

“Error in finding weblogic.Home” is the only thing of value in the exception, but what’s that about? Running setDomainEnv before running Maven didn’t help.

As it turns out, the WebLogic dependencies are location-dependent in some fashion. Simply having weblogic.jar and wlManagementMBean.jar in your Maven repository is not sufficient. While setting a weblogic.home system property has potential, I didn’t have any success with the approach. What did work for me is to use the WebLogic installation directory even though it is less than ideal. Here’s how I configured my dependencies in the POM:

<dependency>
  <groupId>weblogic</groupId>
  <artifactId>weblogic</artifactId>
  <version>9.1.0</version>
  <scope>system</scope>
  <systemPath>C:/bea910/weblogic91/server/lib/weblogic.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>
	
<dependency>
  <groupId>weblogic</groupId>
  <artifactId>wlManagementMBean</artifactId>
  <version>9.1.0</version>
  <scope>system</scope>
  <systemPath>C:/bea910/weblogic91/server/lib/mbeantypes/wlManagementMBean.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>

Essentially, I changed the scope from “provided” to “system” and added the systemPath element which points to the jar in the WebLogic installation directory. I left the hard-coded paths for illustration but you’ll probably want to use properties, instead.

Using the system scope solves the home problem and your provider will build without error. It won’t actually work, but your build was successful so what more could you want? Seriously, that problem will be solved in the next section, but for completeness, I’d like to point out something in case someone knows a better solution than using a WebLogic installation directory. After all, I’d much rather use the Maven repository and I’m guessing you would, too.

Here’s something I discovered:

If you run

java -classpath C:\bea910\weblogic91\server\lib\weblogic.jar weblogic.Home

you get

C:/bea910/weblogic91/server

If you do the same thing against your repository’s weblogic.jar like this

java -classpath “C:\Documents and Settings\MSF\.m2\repository\weblogic\weblogic\9.1.0\weblogic-9.1.0.jar” weblogic.Home

you get

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: error in finding weblogic.Home
        at weblogic.Home.getInstance(Home.java:90)
        at weblogic.Home.getHome(Home.java:105)
        at weblogic.Home.main(Home.java:113)

I’m not sure what it means or how to leverage the information but it seems to be the root of the problem. I got tired of messing with it but if you have an idea, please comment.

Moving right along…

Scheming Minds

As I mentioned above, you should now have a JAR file for your provider. If you copy it to the mbeantypes directory and start WebLogic, though, you’ll find that your provider doesn’t show up in WebLogic console. Very annoying, indeed.

As it turns out, our pals at BEA are messing with our heads. Starting with WebLogic 9, you need to dance the MBeanMaker Two-Step because the second phase — which just jarred the provider in the past — now creates schema files among other things. No schema files means no recognition of your provider by WebLogic.

Fortunately, the solution is pretty simple since you just need to run WebLogicMBeanMaker twice to get all of the required artifacts. Here’s my updated POM snippet:

<!-- Run WebLogicMBeanMaker to build the authentication provider -->
<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>WebLogicMBeanMaker</id>
      <phase>generate-sources</phase>
      <configuration>
        <tasks>
	
          <echo>Building Authentication provider with WebLogicMBeanMaker...</echo>
	
          <!-- Ensure that WebLogicMBeanMaker starts from a clean slate -->
          <delete dir="${project.build.directory}/generated-sources"/>
	
          <path id="gen.path">
            <pathelement path="${project.build.directory}\generated-sources\main\java"/>
            <path refid="maven.compile.classpath"/>
          </path>
	
          <!-- Copy ZAuthenticator.xml to the generated source directory or it won't work -->
          <copy file="${basedir}/conf/ZAuthenticator.xml" todir="${project.build.directory}/generated-sources/main/java"/> 
	
          <!-- Build the MDF (mbean definition file) for the authenticator -->
          <java classname="weblogic.management.commo.WebLogicMBeanMaker" fork="true" failonerror="true">
            <jvmarg line="-Dfiles=${project.build.directory}/generated-sources/main/java
                          -DMDF=${basedir}/conf/ZAuthenticator.xml
                          -DcreateStubs=true -Dverbose=true "/>
            <classpath>
              <path refid="gen.path"/>
            </classpath>
          </java>
	
          <!-- Build the MJF (mbean jar file) for the authenticator . Also
               generates a set of XML binding classes and a schema. -->
          <java classname="weblogic.management.commo.WebLogicMBeanMaker" fork="true" failonerror="true">
            <jvmarg line="-Dfiles=${project.build.directory}/generated-sources/main/java
                          -DMJF=${basedir}/conf/ZAuthenticator -Dverbose=true "/>
	
            <classpath>
              <path refid="gen.path"/>
            </classpath>
          </java>
	
          <!-- Copy meta-data files to the target/classes directory so they get jarred -->
          <copy todir="${project.build.directory}/classes">
            <fileset dir="${basedir}/conf">
              <include name="**/*.xml"/> <!-- ZAuthenticator.xml -->
              <include name="**/*.dtd"/> <!-- commo.dtd -->
            </fileset>
            <fileset dir="${project.build.directory}/generated-sources/main/java">
              <exclude name="**/*.java"/>
            </fileset>
          </copy>
	
          <echo>Building Authentication provider with WebLogicMBeanMaker. DONE!</echo>
        </tasks>
	
 	  <!-- Add the generated sources to the Maven source directory list -->
        <sourceRoot>${project.build.directory}/generated-sources/main/java</sourceRoot>
      </configuration>
	
      <goals>
        <goal>run</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

Now, in addition to the original files, your jar should contain roughly a dozen more files, half of which are XSB files. Your provider should now be recognized by WebLogic after you copy the jar to mbeantypes and restart WebLogic.

Can you handle more good news? The same build configuration works in WebLogic 10.