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

["Jason Vas Dias (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Jason Vas Dias created MNG-5862:
-----------------------------------

             Summary: 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


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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