Using the WebLogic deployment plan to change your ear / war for production

With Weblogic you can use a deployment plan to change your environment settings so it works in your production environment. For example if you put your WSDL url of your web service proxy clients as a context parameter in the web.xml then you can change this by using a deployment plan. This plan is a xml file and can be easily changed. You can apply this plan even after deployment.
First let's take a look at the wsdl url parameter in the web.xml, The deployment plan will change this context parameter

<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" 
version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee">
    <description>Empty web.xml file for Web Application</description>
    <context-param>
        <param-name>wsdlUrl</param-name>
        <param-value>http://localhost:7001/ws_helloworld/HelloWorldServicePort?WSDL</param-value>
     </context-param>
    

To make this work, we need to generate a deployment plan. We will use your application ear or war file as input for this plan. This is the bat file I used for this.

set BEA_HOME=C:\oracle\MiddlewareJdev11g
call %BEA_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\server\bin\setWLSEnv.cmd
set PATH=%BEA_HOME%\jdk160_05\bin
set planname=HelloWorld.xml
set earfile=C:\projecten\workspace\11g_prod\ws_helloworld\webapp\deploy\helloworld.ear
java weblogic.PlanGenerator -all -plan %planname% %earfile%

This will generate a xml file. Change the deployment xml and add a new variable with the right url

<deployment-plan xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/deployment-plan" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/deployment-plan http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/deployment-plan/1.0/deployment-plan.xsd" global-variables="false">
  <application-name>helloworld.ear</application-name>
  <variable-definition>
<!--  add the wsdl var   -->
     <variable> 
        <name>wsdlUrl</name>
        <value>http://localhost:7101/ws_helloworld/HelloWorldServicePort?WSDL</value>
     </variable> 

Now we can change the web.xml part where we use xpath to find the context parameter and replace the value with the just created variable

    <module-descriptor external="false">
      <root-element>web-app</root-element>
      <uri>WEB-INF/web.xml</uri>

<!-- replace the wsdl url with the deployment url -->
      <variable-assignment> 
         <name>wsdlUrl</name> 
         <xpath>/web-app/context-param/[param-name="wsdlUrl"]/param-value</xpath> 
         <operation>replace</operation> 
       </variable-assignment>
    </module-descriptor>
  </module-override>
  <config-root>C:\DOCUME~1\ebiemond\LOCALS~1\Temp\ebiemond\.\config\deployments\ear.ear\plan</config-root>
</deployment-plan>

The plan is finished and we can use this plan with the deployment. You can apply this plan on an ear in the WLS console or you can use this bat file.

set BEA_HOME=C:\oracle\MiddlewareJdev11g
call %BEA_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\server\bin\setWLSEnv.cmd
set PATH=%BEA_HOME%\jdk160_05\bin
set planname=HelloWorld.xml
set earfile=C:\projecten\workspace\11g_prod\ws_helloworld\webapp\deploy\helloworld.ear
java weblogic.Deployer -adminurl http://localhost:7101 -user weblogic -password weblogic -deploy -name HelloWorld -source %earfile% -targets DefaultServer -stage -plan %planname%