Instantiating Oracle Driver results in InvocationTargetException

Question

I have a simple web service that uses an oracle database. When I test the service internally it works fine, however, calling the web service through my client (on the same machine but in a different WAR) throws an invocationtargetexception. I've finally discovered it's an issue with instantiating the OracleDriver. It doesn't throw any exception at all so I cannot find out what the error is.

Googling has only provided a solution of using oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver instead of oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver but that doesn't seem to fix anything. The jar I'm using is ojdbc14.jar and, as far as I can tell, it's included in the class path for the web service properly... since it works when I test the service with a simple main method.

EDIT: The InvocationTargetException is generated by an AxisFault from the Axis server. The invocationtargetexception is a wrapper class, and my attempts to try to extract the exception using .getCause() always return null.

I am deploying the service using jboss and was including the driver JAR file in the library for the source but not for the server. Including the driver in /jboss/server/default/lib resolved it.

Answer 1

2 WARs? I suppose your ojdbc.jar is located inside WEB-INF/lib of the web service's WAR.

Maybe your WAR is inside an EAR, so you should reference the driver in MANIFEST.MF.

More info: http://java.sun.com/j2ee/verified/packaging.html

Answer 2

Without more information, it's hard to provide concrete suggestions; I have however had experience with an Oracle driver that attempts to connect via native OCI libraries, fails to find those libraries installed on the system, and throws an InvocationTargetException. This is all from very vague memory, so your mileage will almost certainly vary.

It's been a while, but if memory serves me, I had a case where the connection URL was incorrectly configured, and OracleDriver (or one of its wrappers) iterated through a set of possible connection methods, trying to find one that worked. In the case that the URL was correctly configured, it never got to the OCI attempt (the thin connection method attempt came first), but if the connection URL was misconfigured, the thin attempt would fail, causing the OCI attempt, which then also failed because the OCI client was not installed on the host (resulting in an InvocationTargetException.)

So, some things to check:

1. Is the connection URL valid? If you're using the same connection URL in both places, are you sure that both processes are binding to the same NIC? If they are binding to different NICs, it might cause connection oddities, even on the same host.
2. Is the environment the same in both cases - if the OCI client is getting used in your development environment, there are likely several environment variables it depends on. If those environment variables aren't set identically in the environment where the servlet container is running, I'd expect different behavior.