CODI on Oracle WebLogic server 12c

Introduction

Oracle released recently their EE6 compliant version of the WebLogic server. It is a full EE6 profile, so everything you need is at your disposal.  Adam Bien did a smoke test and I made a small demo application where some CDI beans are defined inside a jar file placed in the WEB-INF\lib directory of the war file.
All these tests passed so we are ready to test some real world like application.  Just as JSF is an open system (it is build with extensibility in mind), CDI (Contexts and dependency injection, JSR-299) adhere to the same philosophy. And thus any real world application should use one of the extensions that make the life of the developer easy.
One of the popular CDI extensions is Apache MyFaces CODI, which brings you some goodies that you can use in your project.  You can read about the project on the wiki page.

 

Testing CODI

Testing CODI was done with the scope testing program that you can find here. I made the required adjustments in dependency scopes so that it works on any EE6 server. After deploying it on the Oracle WebLogic Server, I received the following error:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: No bean found for type:
org.apache.myfaces.extensions.cdi.core.api.config.CodiCoreConfig at
org.apache.myfaces.extensions.cdi.core.impl.util.CodiUtils.getOrCreateBeanByClass(CodiUtils.java:198)

Apparently this kind of error occurred also on older Glassfish v3 versions. So someone posting this issue on the mailing list received a solution very rapidly.

 

How to package a CODI application for WebLogic 12c?

So I tried the suggestions in the mailing list and the scope testing program works, except for one small issue. And it is not related to WebLogic only, in fact all containers running on Weld have the same problem. A method annotated with @PostConstruct isn’t executed when it is defined on a method in a super class of a bean with a custom scope.
This is the contents of the pom.xml file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.extensions.cdi.bundles</groupId>
    <artifactId>myfaces-extcdi-bundle-jsf20</artifactId>
    <version>${myfaces_codi.version}</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>
…
<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>unpack-codi</id>
            <phase>process-test-resources</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>unpack-dependencies</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
               <includeGroupIds>org.apache.myfaces.extensions.cdi.bundles</includeGroupIds>
                <includeArtifactIds>myfaces-extcdi-bundle-jsf20</includeArtifactIds>
                <outputDirectory>
                    ${project.build.directory}/classes
                </outputDirectory>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Some words of explanation:

Defining the CODI dependency as provided, means that it isn’t included in the packaged war, but you can use the classes in you code.

The maven-dependency-plugin is used to unpack the contents of the CODI jar into the classes directory so that the required classes are available in the war file.

The last thing that needs to be done is to copy the contents of the beans.xml found in the CODI jar file, into the beans.xml file of your web application.

This way, you can use CODI, on the Oracle WebLogic Server 12c.

UPDATE: Seems that there is also a problem when the 'autodeploy' directory is used.  So for the moment only regular deployed WAR files can be used as described above.