Using Hibernate 2.1.2, I'm placing the JCA connector in my EAR to deploy into BEA Weblogic 8.1 SP2.

I have an EAR with hibernate as a connector module. In the ra.xml, I set the MapResources to:

mappings/com/a/MyClass.hbm.xml

My problem is where exactly to put that file in my EAR. I've tried every place I can think of. I thought it would look up the mapping file from your classpath , but this is not working.

I tried putting a jar containing the mapping file (and its containing directories) under /APP-INF/lib (BEA auto-loads jars here)

I tried putting a jar (and also an expanded jar) under /APP-INF/classes (BEA auto-loads classes here)

I tried putting the mappings under my hibernate RAR module directory (e.g. /hibernate/mappings...

I get the error:
SEVERE: Cannot create Hibernate session factory
net.sf.hibernate.MappingException: Resource: mappings/com/a/MyClass.hbm.xml not found
...

If I put the mappings JAR'd into my system classpath, then it finds the mapping there. However, this is obviously not acceptable.

Am I missing something here, does Hibernate really just not work with BEA Weblogic 8.1 SP 2, or what?

Thanks for any help.

I have gotten some more information. This is starting to look like a mod needs to be done to Hibernate JCA:

In ManagedConnectionFactoryImpl, the addResource uses the classloader retrieved from Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().

When I output this classloader, it is the sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader class.

However, if I check getClass().getClassLoader(), it is the Weblogic GenericClassLoader (which is the proper classloader for the EAR).

I'm not sure if something can be modified in this class to support Weblogic and other app servers? I don't know if it's a problem with just WL or with other app servers as well.

I reported bug # HB-737 on this.

Thanks to open source, I was able to make the mod myself as a workaround for now.

Maybe a bug, maybe not. But typically what you need to do in an ear file is to utilize the manifest file's classpath entry. I've not played with deploying rar file inside the ear, but I know this is how it works for mixed war/ejb-jar ear files. Shared resources go into the root of the ear file; then each component in the ear needs a manifest classpath entry referencing those shared components.

This really is really a short-coming of J2EE itself. Pure wars files, for example, have a well defined way of loading resources into the classpath. Not so for shared resources inside an ear. It all has to be done manually through these manifest entries.

I will ask Adrian Brock for his opinion, he is the JCA expert at JBoss I think.