OC4J 10.1.3.4 problem with deploying multiple 2.1 EJBs

Question

I am having troubles migrating from OC4J 10.1.2.3 to 10.1.3.1.4. The problem is for applications that have multiple EJBs (all are 2.1, no EJB 3.0). Jdeveloper will take the default ejb-jar.xml (the one required for Jdeveloper to run it on its stand-alone OC4J instance) and package it into each EJB JAR module NO MATTER what. This results in the app server drilling into each EJB JAR module when deploying, and find the same ejb-jar.xml file N times (where N = number of EJB Modules). This results in duplicate EJB references and will break any JNDI lookups such as: "java:comp/env/ejb/EJBName". Thus deploying an app that has 3 EJBs, EJB1, EJB2 and EJB3 causes the app server to register 9 EJBs instead of 3. I need a best practices way, but in between the way 10.1.3.4 and JDeveloper are acting the situation is rather dire...

Side note: They will work if the web app's JNDI look-up code is refractored to just "ejb/EJBName". This is not desirable though.

Answer 1

You should check the Oracle documentation to see which is your case. The Oracle® Containers for J2EE Enterprise JavaBeans Developer's Guide is a good start According to the Oracle® Containers for J2EE Services Guide, chapter 2: Using JNDI when you use the form "ejb/EJBName" you perform "local" lookup. If you want to use the full form you must check the "Enabling Global JNDI Lookups" section of the "Using JNDI" chapter.

Answer 2

The problem was multiple reference in our deployment profiles. We were create a deployment profile for EACH EJB. This meant that each EJB had it's own ejb-jar.xml (this file contained a description of all EJBS in the project). Therefore, every time JDeveloper created an EJB, it placed a descriptor of all EJBS in each EJB it generated, causing an NxN amount of references. Therefore Nx(N-1) extra references.

Now, the key point is that Oracle Application Server 10.1.2.3.0 and bellow did not care about these duplicate references. However as we can see, 10.1.3.1.4 is a much different version and this did break.

Our fix: to have only 1 EJB Deployment profile that contains all of the EJB classes and the POJO's that they use. Remember, before there was 1 EJB Profile for each EJB... All this did was allow for Jdeveloper (which is crap IMHO) to correctly generate a valid EAR. A combination of Jdeveloper and Oracle's Application Server's crap is what caused this.