maven overlay of exploded war: excluding items from exploded war

Question

I have been struggling to workout how to exclude items from the exploded war using the maven overlay plugin.

I have the following:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>build-directory-tree</id>
            <phase>process-resources</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>exploded</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <overlays>
                    <overlay>
                        <groupId>com.mycompany.Online</groupId>
                        <artifactId>MyCompanyOnline</artifactId>
                        <excludes>
                            <exclude>WEB-INF/web.xml,WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml,WEB-INF/wro/**,WEB-INF/wro/wro-mapping.properties</exclude>
                        </excludes>
                    </overlay>
                </overlays>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

The web.xml and applicationContext.xml get excluded fine but they are located under: ${basedir}/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/

The remaining directory and files in that exclude list are not excluded. These are located in the exploded war under: ${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/WEB-INF/wro/

I am not sure what I could be doing differently to exclude the contents of ${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/WEB-INF/wro/

No matter what I try those files are stilled overlayed despite the exclude.

Answer 1

After digging around for ages and trying different configurations I finally found what works.

Using mvn clean install -X on the child that is overlaying the parent I confirmed the files were being copied as there was a "+" symbol instead of a "-". In fact the files I though were being excluded because of the exclude block where actually excluded because the child has a file with the same name in the same location.

Eventually I looked in the plugin.xml for the maven-war-plugin-2.2.jar and I found this parameter: dependentWarExcludes which according to the xml is:

 <deprecated>Use <overlay><excludes>
 instead</deprecated>

As can be seen in my question above I tried to use <exclude> in <overlay> as recommended but that was actually not working for anything. In the end dependentWarExcludes worked after restructuring the plugin block as follows:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>

        <configuration>
            <overlays>
                <overlay>
                    <groupId>com.mycompany.Online</groupId>
                    <artifactId>MyCompanyOnline</artifactId>
                </overlay>
            </overlays>
            <dependentWarExcludes>WEB-INF/web.xml,WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml,WEB-INF/wro/</dependentWarExcludes>
        </configuration>

        <executions>
            <execution>
                <id>build-directory-tree</id>
                <phase>process-resources</phase>
                <goals>
                    <goal>exploded</goal>
                </goals>
            </execution>
        </executions>
</plugin>