Configuring shared-libraries settings post deployment

With the introduction of the shared-library mechanism in OC4J 10.1.3.x, it is possible to configure the set of libraries that an application has access to. This is done at the application level using the tag to include a named shared-library, or its counterpart, to remove a library from the view of the application.

These settings are made in the OC4J specific orion-application.xml deployment descriptor for the application, typically either as a hard-coded entry in the packaged EAR file that is being deployed, or they are set during the deployment process using the Class Loading Task in the ASC console.

In the current releases, there are no ways to easily change these settings once the application has been deployed. One approach that has been used is to perform a redeployment operation of the application and make the change via the ASC console. Obviously this requires a redeployment to be performed. While you can also manually edit the resulting orion-application.xml file to add/remove/change the settings, this provides no validation that the settings are correct.

To address this, for the next patch release of OC4J (10.1.3.5) we are looking to add a couple of new shared-library commands to the admin_client.jar utility to operate on existing, deployed applications. These commands will allow you to perform add or delete operations on either of the or configuration elements.

As an example, lets say you have an application in which you wish to use the Apache Xerces parser instead of the Oracle XML parser. This change can be performed during deployment as described here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/oc4j/1013/how_to/how-to-swapxmlparser/doc/readme.html

But! When you test your application, it throws an Exception and you eventually realise that you forgot to make the change to the shared-libraries during the deployment of the application. The Oracle XML parser is still being used.

Using the new commands you would be able to change this on the deployed application as follows:

>java -jar admin_client.jar .... -addRemoveInheritedSharedLibrary -appName myapp -name oracle.xml


>java -jar admin_client.jar .... -addImportSharedLibrary -appName myapp -name apache.xml -minVersion 2.7 -maxVersion 2.7