[jira] [Commented] (MNG-5862) POM XML parser needs XInclude and/or XML Entity support

["Elliotte Rusty Harold (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-5862?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=16549521#comment-16549521 ] 

Elliotte Rusty Harold commented on MNG-5862:
--------------------------------------------

XInclude or external entities enable the sharing of chunks of XML. Properties only allow values. For instance a property can define a version number such as 1.3.2 but not a version element or a complete dependency element.

> POM XML parser needs XInclude and/or XML Entity support
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: MNG-5862
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-5862
>             Project: Maven
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>          Components: POM
>            Reporter: Jason Vas Dias
>            Priority: Major
>
> POM XML files can get very large and repetitive ,  and not all modularizaton 
> scenarios can be resolved by using a Super POM as described in MNG-1980 ,
> and would be easily resolved if only the POM parser supported XIncludes or
> XML Entities - neither are supported. 
> Here is one such scenario:
> I have a large project that has several SureFire plugin based "Test Suites" -
> each test suite uses a "common-at-classes" module of common test classes,
> and is essentially identical except in its XML configuration "test resource"  files
>  - so the structure is like this :
> {quote}
> {noformat}
>  Top Level project directory:
>    ./pom.xml
>    ./acceptance-tests/pom.xml
>    ./acceptance-tests/common-at-classes/pom.xml
>    ./acceptance-tests/test-suite_#1/pom.xml
>    ...
>    ./acceptance-tests/test-suite_#N/pom.xml
> {noformat}
> {quote}
> There are @ 10 ( being upgraded to @ 20)  "test suites", 
> which all do exactly the same thing, but with slightly
> different "test resource" configuration files,  
> and depend on the 'acceptance-tests/common-at-classes" JAR .
> We can modularize all the test-suite dependencies OK in the single
> common-at-classes/pom.xml location .
> But their is no way to modularize the actual XML code that runs each
> test-suite with plugin executions - these plugin execution stanzas can currently ONLY
> be in each test-suite#N directory, even though they are identical.
> It would make no sense to have the "Super POM" : acceptance-tests/pom.xml 
> contain the plugin executions to run any single test  suite ;  nor can the 
> common-at-classes/pom.xml contain the plugin execution to run any 
> test suite, since a test suite run depends on the customized test resource
> files that only exist in each "test_suite#N/" sub-project .  
> So the only solution currently available with Maven is to copy the XML stanzas
> that configure and run the test suite ( about 400 lines of XML )  into each of
> the 10-20 test-suite/pom.xml files ; this is all because Maven does not support 
> XML XInclude or XML Entities; if it did, we could put all this code into one XML 
> file provided by the common-at-classes project, and include it in each test 
> suite .
> The test suite XML is then a nightmare to maintain, consistently for all test suites.
> This is becoming such a problem that I am considering making the root project
> POM do nothing more than transform the test-suite poms with XML XInclude-s
> (using an external XML processor), creating a new copy of the whole project,
>  and then run an exec plugin goal which runs maven with the transformed POMs.
> Please, please can we have some form of XInclude or XML Entity support , or support for an "<include ...>" element, in the POM parser !



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