8.3. Overview of the Assembly Descriptor
When the standard assembly descriptors introduced in
Section 8.2, “Assembly Basics” are not adequate, you will need to define
your own assembly descriptor. The assembly descriptor is an XML
document which defines the structure and contents of an assembly. The
assembly descriptor contains five main configuration sections, plus
two additional sections: one for specifying standard
assembly-descriptor fragments, called component descriptors, and
another for specifying custom file processor classes to help manage
the assembly-production process.
-
Base Configuration
-
This section contains the information required by all assemblies,
plus some additional configuration options related to the format of
the entire archive, such as the base path to use for all archive
entries. For the assembly descriptor to be valid, you must at least
specify the assembly id, at least one format, and at least one of
the other sections shown above.
-
File Information
-
The configurations in this segment of the assembly descriptor apply
to specific files on the file system within the project’s directory
structure. This segment contains two main sections:
files and
fileSets. You use files and fileSets to control the
permissions of files in an assembly and to include or exclude files
from an assembly.
-
Dependency Information
-
Almost all projects of any size depend on other projects. When
creating distribution archives, project dependencies are usually
included in the end-product of an assembly. This section manages
the way dependencies are included in the resulting archive. This
section allows you to specify whether dependencies are unpacked,
added directly to the lib/ directory, or mapped to new file
names. This section also allows you to control the permissions of
dependencies in the assembly, and which dependencies are included
in an assembly.
-
Repository Information
-
At times, it’s useful to isolate the sum total of all artifacts
necessary to build a project, whether they’re dependency artifacts,
POMs of dependency artifacts, or even a project’s own POM ancestry
(your parent POM, its parent, and so on). This section allows you
to include one or more artifact-repository directory structures
inside your assembly, with various configuration options. The
Assembly plugin does not have the ability to include plugin
artifacts in these repositories yet.
-
Module Information
-
This section of the assembly descriptor allows you to take
advantage of these parent-child relationships when assembling your
custom archive, to include source files, artifacts, and
dependencies from your project’s modules. This is the most complex
section of the assembly descriptor, because it allows you to work
with modules and sub-modules in two ways: as a series of
fileSets
(via the sources section) or as a series of dependencySets (via
the binaries section).
|
