[Todd Kofford]

It would be great to define a custom task during the “exploded deployment” process. Something like use an alternate web.xml file prior to deploying. This could be very valuable in developing portlets, since portlets are usually deployed to production via different methods.

We use the exploded deployment process a lot during development on our local machines, but when we migrate to other platforms we use various other techniques depending on the application and platform.

One of these “other” techniques is for deploying portlets to uportal. Uportal has a very specific way to deploy portlets which, when given a portlet *.war file, will extract the *.war file in the web containers webapps directory and re-write the web.xml file, adding in (servlet) entries for portlets depending on the version of the portlet container (pluto) that it is using. Therefore, when we commit code to our source code repository, we don’t want to muck it up with (servlet) portlet definitions because this can/will change over time. Having a way to use an alternate web.xml file during exploded deployment would solve this problem.

Even though my scenario is very specific, I could see a custom “exploded deployment” task being extremely useful in the generic sense. In addition to using alternate files, mabe have some simple variable substitution of database connection strings and logging levels. This is something that everyone that migrates code up platforms does already, and the “exploded deployment” could be used in those migrations too.

I hope that the MyEclipse project team will consider this request, and I’d be happy to explain this in further detail if necessary.

Thanks,
Todd Kofford
tkofford@ku.edu

[Loyal Water]

Todd,
This is a very interesting request that we’ve gotten from time to time and the difficulty for us on this end is to normalize it into a common set of enhancements that everyone can use. Can you give me a detailed scenario of what exactly you were looking for. It would be very helpful in understanding the flow better.

[valheru]

This would be really useful for me too, especially the string substitution as we need to deploy to development, demo and live systems. We’ve had to fall back to Ant / Maven tasks instead of using the servers window for this.

I think an extra screen on the deployment configuration is all that would required for this. On this screen could be two lists – one to enter a list of files to apply substitutions to, and another list to enter a selection of .properties files within the project which contain the strings to use for various deployment scenarios.

When creating a WAR file it could then ask which of the .properties file to load the strings from.

e.g.
In hibernate.cfg.xml we could specify
<property name=”connection.datasource”>@@datasource@@</property>

Then configure the list of .properties files as:

#File: dev.properties
datasource=java:comp/env/jdbc/oraDev
loglevel=info

#File: demo.properties
datasource=java:comp/env/jdbc/oraDemo
loglevel=debug

#File: live.properties
datasource=java:comp/env/jdbc/oraLive
loglevel=error

Here’s a couple of mockups as an example of how it could work:

Somewhere in configuration of a deployment:

After clicking redeploy in server window:

Alternatively the option to run an Ant or Maven task before deployment would be useful too.

[Loyal Water]

valheru,
We appreciate you posting these mockups for us. I have already forwarded this request to the executive team. I hope we can get this feature in soon for our users.

[Todd Kofford]

I hope we can get this feature in soon for our users.

It’s been over 2 years since this was requested. I guess “Hope” doesn’t work for feature requests.

[support-swapna]

tkofford ,

We already have this in our enhancement list. As we have to prioritize between several other feature requests, this went further down our list. I will get this again to the management’s attention.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

[Author]

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