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I have a Spring Boot application that I usually deploy on a Tomcat server. Now I want to be able to also deploy it on Websphere 9, though it will still be deployed on the usual Tomcat server most of the time. I packaged the app as a war and deployed it on Websphere through the admin interface, then ran the application. And as pointed out in many other posts, it did not work because JNDI lookup does not work the same way. I tried solutions offered here and there, but nothing worked.

My datasource is defined in Websphere with name jdbc/foobar. My lookup is done in my Spring Boot app with:

JndiDataSourceLookup dataSourceLookup = new JndiDataSourceLookup();
DataSource ds = dataSourceLookup.getDataSource("java:comp/env/jdbc/foobar");

This works on Tomcat but does not on Websphere. Many answers on other SO posts about this say that for Websphere, one must lookup "jdbc/foobar" without the prefix (for instance here in the answer's comments), which is true (I could get it to work), but I want to have code that remains compatible with the usual deployment on tomcat.

As a side note, the getDataSource method automatically adds the prefix if it is absent, which means I needed to do this instead:

JndiDataSourceLookup dataSourceLookup = new JndiDataSourceLookup();
dataSourceLookup.getJndiTemplate().getContext().lookup("jdbc/foobar");

This still is useful because, since it worked well, it proved that my problem is not a wrong datasource definition at server side.

Since I want my code to remain the same tomcat-compatible code, I kept the "java:comp/env/jdbc/foobar" lookup and I looked into the answers advising to add some configuration, most notably this one. I located the ibm-web-bnd.xml file, which is created by Websphere at deployement time and put in the WEB-INF folder. I added the advised resource-ref tag there:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-bnd xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://websphere.ibm.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://websphere.ibm.com/xml/ns/javaee http://websphere.ibm.com/xml/ns/javaee/ibm-web-bnd_1_0.xsd" version="1.0">
  <virtual-host name="default_host"/>
  <resource-ref name="jdbc/foobar" binding-name="jdbc/foobar" />
</web-bnd>

Then, since I don't have a web.xml in my war, I tried the @Resource trick:

@Component
@Resource(name = "jdbc/foobar",type = javax.sql.DataSource.class)
public class MyServlet extends HttpServlet {

I could verify the servlet is loaded correctly but the Resource annotation does no seem to do the trick. Then I noticed a web.xml is also created by Websphere beside the ibm-web-bnd.xml file, so I supposed I might give it a try and I added the resource-ref tag inside (the rest was already here, added by Websphere):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
                      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_1.xsd"
    version="3.1">

    <env-entry>
        <env-entry-name>logback/context-name</env-entry-name>
        <env-entry-type>java.lang.String</env-entry-type>
        <env-entry-value>main</env-entry-value>
    </env-entry>

    <listener>
        <listener-class>ch.qos.logback.classic.selector.servlet.ContextDetachingSCL</listener-class>
    </listener>

    <session-config>
        <session-timeout>15</session-timeout>
    </session-config>

    <resource-ref>
        <description />
        <res-ref-name>jdbc/foobar</res-ref-name>
        <res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type>
        <res-auth>Container</res-auth>
        <res-sharing-scope>Shareable</res-sharing-scope>
    </resource-ref>
</web-app>

This still did not work. I also noticed that Websphere created another file named web_merged.xml, which seems to merge the automatically created web.xml with the real one (which in my case does not exist). I tried to add the same code shown above to this file too, but it did not work better.

Now, I am out of clue. Does someone have any other idea, or maybe noticed an obvious mistake I made?

Steph
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1 Answers1

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What you tried in the bindings file looks like it should have worked, assuming that you are performing the lookup from within the same web module in which you specified the binding (because it is java:comp scoped).

Even so, you ought to be able to do this in a completely standard way without a bindings file at all (where it can be difficult to get all of the syntax correct), by just using the @Resource annotation alone,

@Resource(name = "java:comp/env/jdbc/foobar", lookup = "jdbc/foobar", type = javax.sql.DataSource.class)

I'd recommend getting rid of the extra bindings/deployment descriptor that you were experimenting with and try with just the annotation, at least to start with. If it turns out that you aren't in the same module, you could use java:app (if in the same app) or otherwise java:global instead of java:comp, which you would need to update in both places.

njr
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