javax.naming.NameNotFoundException when trying to lookup resource declared in context.xml

Question

I am deploying a WAR to JBoss EAP 7. In my WAR's META-INF/context.xml file I have the following:

<Context unloadDelay="500000">
    <Resource name="jdbc/sybase/somedb"
          auth="Container"
          type="javax.sql.DataSource"
          driverClassName="net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver"
          url="jdbc:jtds:sybase://localhost:12501/somedb"
          username="username" password="secret"
          validationQuery="select 1"              
          maxActive="2" maxIdle="0" maxWait="-1"/>          
...

From my Java code I try to obtain the DataSource doing a:

InitialContext cxt = new InitialContext(); 
DataSource ds = (DataSource) cxt.lookup( "java:/comp/env/jdbc/sybase/somedb" );

The exact above code works and the name is found in the context when I deploy to Tomcat 8 but not when I deploy to JBoss EAP 7. In the latter case I get:

Caused by: javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: comp/env/jdbc/sybase/somedb -- service jboss.naming.context.java.comp.env.jdbc.sybase.somedb
at org.jboss.as.naming.ServiceBasedNamingStore.lookup(ServiceBasedNamingStore.java:106)
at org.jboss.as.naming.NamingContext.lookup(NamingContext.java:207)
at org.jboss.as.naming.InitialContext$DefaultInitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:235)
at org.jboss.as.naming.NamingContext.lookup(NamingContext.java:193)
at org.jboss.as.naming.NamingContext.lookup(NamingContext.java:189)
at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:417)
at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:417)

What am I doing wrong and how can I fix the above problem?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

Your META-INF/context.xml file is a Tomcat deployment descriptor (not defined by the Java EE specification) so it is not seen or parsed by JBoss EAP 7.

There are many alternatives to this including the solution to is there a standard way to define a JDBC Datasource for Java EE containers.

If you were to ask RedHat support they would likely recommend that you create the datasource using server administration tools such as the admin console or jboss-cli.sh. This decouples your application from the datasource definition so that you can specify environment specific settings (such as pool sizes and hostnames) without repackaging your WAR.file. This method also requires you to deploy the JDBC driver jar separately from your application.

javax.naming.NameNotFoundException when trying to lookup resource declared in context.xml

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