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How do i create a data source in WebSphere Liberty via JMX

I am unable to find a code snippet for creating a datasource in Liberty via a Java Client. I looked up the ConnectionManagerMbean, but its documentation says that the Mbean instance wont be available until it is first used.
Can someone point me in right direction. I am kinda new to both Liberty and JMX so please bear with me if this sounds kinda rookyish.
Thanks in advance.

The reason you are unable to locate any examples of creating a Liberty data source via JMX is because it is not possible in Liberty to create data sources via JMX. In Liberty, data sources can be created via server configuration - the dataSource element - or via the #DataSourceDefinition annotation within an application component or <data-source> element within a deployment descriptor (such as web.xml) of an application.
Once you have created the data source, as you mentioned from the ConnectionManagerMBean documentation, you will need to use the data source first (access it from an application) before the MBean is made available. This aligns with Liberty's goals of having fast startup time and only loading/initializing what applications actually use. The behavior you observe sounds consistent with this, and you just need to perform an operation within your application first, and then you should hopefully be able to access the MBean.

How to integrate GraphiQL with Spring-Boot?

My target is to build a GraphQL server on Spring with (1) GraphiQL IDE (2) dynamic GraphQL schema at run-time. My GraphQL engine is GraphQL-Java.
In my first try, I use graphql-java-spring-boot-starter-webmvc and graphiql-spring-boot-starter.
Both the GraphQL server and the GraphiQL work well.
However, under the graphql-java-spring-boot-starter-webmvc framework, a #Bean of GraphQL class is needed. In this bean, the schema is loaded when the server starts so it could not been updated.
In my second try, I don't use graphql-java-spring-boot-starter-webmvc. Instead, I choose spring-boot-starter-web to start the web server and define my own RestController. This is easy to update the GraphQL instance. But I don't find a way to integrate with GraphiQL. I googled GraphiQL+Spring but all solutions are with graphql-java-spring-boot-starter.
Appreciate if anyone could provide me an idea on either approach.

It can be enabled in properties:
graphql.graphiql.enabled=true
It is accessible via the root url +/graphiql example http://localhost:8080/graphiql
You can find a good detailed example here : https://github.com/NoorKrichen/GraphQL-Spring-Boot-Example

Do you have a sample of your setup in git?
It sounds like some configuration problem. But naturally using graphql-java-spring-boot-starter-webmvc all your *.graphql schemas should be picked up in the configured schema resource path. check if you have the path set in your application.yml or if your schema is in the configured path if its already set or by default.
On your second point: "I googled GraphiQL+Spring but all solutions are with graphql-java-spring-boot-starter."
This makes sense for quick guides and demos as using Springboot the plumbing is somehow hidden away from you so that you can focus on the technology at hand being demo'd in this case GraphQl.
On GraphiQL:
Sounds like you are intending to have this embedded with your application, you may not want to do so in production. Depending on your use case there are many other alternatives that are standalone and gives you all the functionality of GraphiQL plus more e.g Altair Graphql Client and Insomnia to name a few.

Can I have multiple Java webapps with overlapping paths?

I have a large collection of different independent (stateless) web services written in Java and compiled as WAR files. I want to deploy them to a single web application server.
If the URIs handled by the services in each WAR file began with a prefix I could use as a web app name, then this would be easy. I could, for instance, have
SALES WAR FILE: contains code for the following:
GET http://example.com/sales/widgets
POST http://example.com/sales/widgets
GET http://example.com/sales/sky-hooks
MARKETING WAR FILE: contains code for the following:
GET http://example.com/marketing/widgets
PUT http://example.com/marketing/sky-hooks
...in which case I would simply deploy two WAR files under the names "sales" and "marketing". However, I am not that fortunate. Instead, the URI paths handled by the components overlap. Something like this:
SALES WAR FILE: contains code for the following:
GET http://example.com/widgets/sales
POST http://example.com/widgets/sales
GET http://example.com/sky-hooks/sales
MARKETING WAR FILE: contains code for the following:
GET http://example.com/widgets/marketing
PUT http://example.com/sky-hooks/marketing
My question is how (if at all) I can deploy these on a single web application server.
I am open to suggestions that require a significant amount of work. For instance, my best-so-far idea is to build services that expect a component-name prefix before the regular URI path, then pipe all incoming traffic through a different server that knows what component each URI pattern falls into and modifies the URI to add that prefix. The difficulty with this approach is that tools like Swagger that read my source code will have a mistaken idea of what the URIs look like.
Any ideas?

If you're willing to put apache in front of your web container, you can use apache's mod_proxy to forward request to the right place.
One way this could work, would be deploy the separate wars at separate prefixes as in your first case (sales and marketing) and then use ProxyPass to send the requests to the correct place:
ProxyPass /widget/sales http://example.com/sales/widget
ProxyPass /sky-hooks/sales http://example.com/sales/sky-hooks
ProxyPass /widget/marketing http://example.com/marketing/widget
ProxyPass /sky-hooks/marketing http://example.com/marketing/sky-hooks
Its probably a better idea to just refactor your routing though - it might be hard to maintain.
(EDIT: I originally suggested mod_rewrite, but I wanted to make my answer more specific, and it looks like this could be done purely with proxying)

If I understand your question correctly, one of the solutions would be (I am assuming Tomcat is used but this should apply to most of the modern servlet containers):
1) Deploy your sales and marketing wars with different prefixes. I.e., using your example, they should be able to serve the following urls:
GET http://example.com/sales/widgets/sales
POST http://example.com/sales/widgets/sales
GET http://example.com/sales/sky-hooks/sales
GET http://example.com/marketing/widgets/marketing
PUT http://example.com/marketing/sky-hooks/marketing
2) Use UrlRewriteFilter to craft lightweight web application that will be deployed to your servlet container root prefix (for Tomcat it is called ROOT.war) and will rewrite urls in incoming requests to point to relevant web application.
In other words, incoming request like:
/widgets/sales
will be transformed to:
/sales/widgets/sales
... and delivered to sales webapp.
Similarly, in response urls like:
/sales/widgets/sales
will be rewritten to:
/widgets/sales
3) Deploy this war to root of your servlet container.
This approach is somewhat similar to the one suggested by #nont but does not require apache as a frontend as the rewriting functionality will be handled by root web application (UrlRewriteFilter basically implements mod_rewrite functionality).
In other words you'll be able to deploy all your applications (including this rewrite application that is deployed to the root prefix) to single server alleviating need for extra intermediate proxy/rewrite servers.

First, Determine How the Deployments may be Configured
Are you sure the absolute URIs must overlap? The context root will prefix the path supported by each service, unless the absolute path has somehow been coded into the application itself. The first step is to enable direct access to each WAR file, either through unique context roots or application instances.
Option 1: Set the Context Root for each WAR File Explicitly
The context root for a war file is set at deploy time. For some servers, this can be set outside of the web application using an external deployment descriptor. For Tomcat, it may embedded within META-INF/context.xml. See http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/context.html for more information.
Option 2: Separate the Context Root Instances using Multiple Containers
Alternatively, deploy each war file to a separate instance of a Java EE servlet container, each running on a different port. This will solve the deployment conflict in the case of a hard-coded absolute path.
Finally, Set up a Virtual Host and Proxy the Requests via Apache and mod_jk
Once the context roots instances have been made uniquely accessible by one of the previous methods, configure an instance of Apache to serve as a reverse-proxy. First, set up a virtual host to handle requests for the externally visible URI. Next, configure mod_jk to route the requests to the correct WAR file deployment. See http://tomcat.apache.org/connectors-doc/webserver_howto/apache.html for more details.
Afterthoughts
The above solution approach is generic for this type of problem and will require some knowledge of Apache and Tomcat configuration, which were chosen as example reverse-proxy and Java EE servlet technologies for its implementation. Additional detail on the deployment constraints would help to determine an optimal solution. In general, identifying the hard constraints on what may be changed versus what may not be changed should guide you quickly to a solution.

The obvious slotuion is to rename the wars, or refactor so that the appropriate mappings are in the correct place.
Anything else is going to be a bit hacky, you can't change the war name, even to soemthing like below :
SALES WAR FILE: contains code for the following:
GET http://example.com/webapp1/widgets/sales
POST http://example.com/webapp1/widgets/sales
GET http://example.com/webapp1/sky-hooks/sales
MARKETING WAR FILE: contains code for the following:
GET http://example.com/webapp2/widgets/marketing
PUT http://example.com/webapp2/sky-hooks/marketing
You could also create another war for routing/filtering, that redirects everything appropriately - but that also relies on altering url somewhat.

This is a use case for Reverse Proxy. If your web server is Apache, as suggested by #nont proxy_mod can be used to create a reverse proxy.
I know that IBM Http Server (IHS) also allows this mod.

How to pass data from an application to a JCA resource adapter?

I want to configure a self-written JCA 1.6 inbound resource adapter (RA). My big problem is that the RA needs to get access to some (dynamic) configuration data living in the application that uses the RA.
Now I know that this is against the original idea of the whole JCA idea but unfortunately I cannot change this design as quickly as I'd like/have to.
The data I need to get to the RA is
the port it's supposed to listen on,
the license used for the whole application (the feature the RA supplies requires extra licensing)
additional configuration data stored in a db
I've come up with four ideas:
Use the asadmin create-resource-adapter-config. Due to the fact that glassfish doesn't seem to restart apps depending on the RA, we need to restart the application after this. While this attempt is suitable for the port, it won't fit for the other data.
Use administered objects to give my application a means to pass data in to the RA. This idea is mentioned here. I guess this does it, but the spec states in chapter 13.4.2.3 that
Note, administered objects are not used for setting up asynchronous message
deliveries to message endpoints. The ActivationSpec JavaBean is used to hold all
the necessary activation information needed for asynchronous message delivery
setup.
But I cannot get any dynamic data to the ActivationSpec object (neither through a DeploymentDescriptor nor through annotations). Or did I miss something here? :-)
Use JDBC directly to access the data (also grabbed the idea from here). While this is presumably the best idea, it does not work for the mentioned licensing data as it is not stored in the db.
The last idea I had was to put a method in the MessageDrivenBean (through my interface) that is used to fetch data from within the RA. That method could be called from the RA and would supply the data. But: I just think that is quite abusive as it couples the RA to the app.
Dear community, what are your thoughts on this one? I'm afraid it's not so easy to find answers to these questions, so I'd be quite happy about opinions!
Thanks and cheers,
Julius

In the ra.xml there is the possibility to define config-properties. In Websphere these then show up as editable fields in a table of custom properties for the selected resource adapter. I'm working on a similar problem, I also need to pass hostname / port info to an RA. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to read the contents of these fields from within the RA however.

The solution I finally came up with is to use the #ConfigProperty annotation. This means I use option one of my question above.
So my ResourceAdapter class looks like this:
public class Hl7ResourceAdapter implements ResourceAdapter {
#ConfigProperty
private Integer port = null;
// Rest from ResourceAdapter interface omitted here...
// Use port here to open socket...
}
The #ConfigProperty fields can now be set through either
a resource-adapter-config
the ra.xml deployment descriptor
Now in order to reconfigure these settings I use glassfish's REST interface to change these settings programmatically (one could also use the asadmin create-resource-adapter-config command). I circumvent the problem, that glassfish does not restart the application that uses the resource adapter by simply restarting it myself through REST. (To be precise: I disable the application and then reenable it to get around another bug in glassfish)
A few additional notes:
We deploy the resource adapter's .rar file into the .ear of the application using it.
We have a separate application outside glassfish (standalone) that calls the REST interface to do such things as restart the resource adapter application etc. It is obvious that an application cannot restart itself properly.
Hope this helps. kutuzof, will this get you any further?

Streaming Dynamic Files from Spring MVC

I've got a Spring Web MVC application (and also a BlazeDS application, though not as relevant) where files are dynamically generated based on certain client actions.
I'd like to just map a certain directory on the file system to Spring MVC (or the app server) url and let it serve the files in that directory (with streaming and standard last-modified header support). Ideally, the mapped directory would be configured via the spring config, since I already have support per-machine for setting that up.
So, how can I do this? The best I can find so far is to write a controller that reads the file manually and streams it byte-by-byte. However, that seems far less than ideal. Is support for something like this already baked into Spring MVC or the standard application server spec?
Thanks!

If your processing model supports it, why not cut the middleman of the filesystem out of the picture completely and just stream the files back through the response stream as they are generated? Take a look at the AbstractExcelView and AbstractPDFView classes of Spring MVC to see some examples of how this is done.

or the standard application server spec?
Yes, there is. As you didn't mention which one you're using, I'll give a Tomcat-targeted answer. All you basically need to do is to add a Context element for /path/to/your/resources in /conf/server.xml:
<Context docBase="/path/to/your/resources" path="/resources" />
This way they'll be accessible through http://example.com/resources/...

Ideal for this is using an lightweight proxying server in front of your appserver, like a nginx or lighthttpd. You can configure it for serving static content, without calling your app.
If directory and files so dynamic, you can prepare real path to file at your controller and give this filepath to the frontend server, using headers. For example for nginx it's a X-Accel-Redirect header. Read more about this (and follow links for other http servers) there