How to edit snapshot dependencies

Question

I am very new to the industry, so apologies in advance for the very likely stupidity of the question. In the team, we work with Intellij IDEA 13 as IDE, and use Maven 3 for our projects. We provide a few online services and portals, and I'm just starting to work on one: the project has several dependencies that are shared by other older projects, some are JAR archives, some are WARs...

To my questions re: how to edit those dependencies locally (e.g. editing a resources.properties was the case I had in mind) my tutor suggested turning the dependencies into snapshots and work with those. What I managed to do was create a copy of the appropriate folders in my local repository and change wherever the version of the dependency was in the name or in the files, then modify my pom.xml files.

Now, this works perfectly if I open the JAR/WAR and edit some file, but I'd like to be able to do it from my IDE, also cause not being able to suggests I'm probably doing this in a wrong way. Do I need to somehow unpack the dependency to be able to do so? Is my entire approach wrong?

P.S.: I would ask someone in my office, but oddly enough none of those who could help are at work today anymore!

Answer 1

If none of your colleagues was able to help you, I am afraid there might be something else hidden.

However, let's try it!

I am guessing, here, that your resources.properties is a part of his own project. Project handled by Maven and expressed as a dependency in one of your main project.

I am also guessing that your main projects are WARs (Webapps mostly, services, portals) and the JARs are libraries, configurations, etc...)

Therefore, I am guessing that your webapps are referencing some libraries as Maven dependencies, to a specific version.

That said, IntelliJ (and other IDE) can easily handle modification of either JARs and WARs related to each other via Maven as long as the visioning is meaningful.

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Note: Having -SNAPSHOT at the end of the version number tell to Maven NOT to cache the package. On the opposite, a definitive version number is considered as released and is only fetched from the cache. This is important because with a SNAPSHOT, you can publish an illimited number of time and it is guaranteed to have the latest version.

Note: Doing mvn clean install publish a package into your local Maven repository (generally located in ~/.m2) and is only available to you.

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The general good practice is to have, in all the development branches of your DVCS, all your owned, often modified projects (Don't be too greedy, it depend on the situation) as SNAPSHOT. And during a release (Maven has a specific plugin for that) change all the versions to a final one, attributed in this precise moment (You never know if you will need a minimal version or a major). Your code, then, has always the SNAPSHOT number of your expected next release.

Finally, I think that in your case, if you choose to change the pom.xml of one of your library for a SNAPSHOT, you should change the pom.xml of the root project to correspond.

If this dependency version is the same, then, you can add your library as a module within IntelliJ and the IDE will do the math to figure that the Maven dep and the Java module are the same entity.

I don't even know if that's help you (I'm not even sure if it's clear), but I hope it will make you ask more questions about what you need. Your co-workers will probably be able to help you more.