Thanks for the link, I did find a solution.
I am working in a local development environment and the deployment plan exists to replace jndi variable entries in the web.xml.
I found that if I take the variables defined under the <variable-definitions> element in the deployment plan and create a cooresponding entry in the web.xml with:
<env-entry>
<description>env variable</description>
<env-entry-name>loginType</env-entry-name>
<env-entry-type>java.lang.String</env-entry-type>
<env-entry-value>email</env-entry-value>
</env-entry>
you don’t need to deploy the deployment plan with the application or do an autodeply with an ear. This is a workaround so if you need to actually deploy the deployment plan with the application I think you’ll need to autodeploy an ear file.