Unable to access datasource remotely through JBoss

Question

Context

I have a JBoss where I have sucessfully deployed a datasource mydatasource-ds.xml. It's JNDI name is java:mydatasourceDS. JBoss claims that the datasource is succesfully deployed. The JMX console agress too.

Problem

I want to use this datasource from a client java app launched on a separate JVM. But I get an exception saying the java:mydatasourceDS cannot be found.

java.lang.ClassCastException: javax.naming.Reference cannot be cast to javax.sql.DataSource

Details

Here is the persistence.xml file :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence version="1.0"
xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd">
<persistence-unit name="mydatasource-db" transaction-type="JTA">
    <jta-data-source>java:mydatasourceDS</jta-data-source>
    <properties>
        <property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="true" />
        <property name="hibernate.format_sql" value="true" />

        <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect" />
        <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="update" />
        <property name="hibernate.default_schema" value="rec" />

        <property name="hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class" value="org.hibernate.transaction.JBossTransactionManagerLookup"/>
    </properties>
</persistence-unit>

Here is the jndi.properties file :

java.naming.factory.initial=org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContextFactory
java.naming.provider.url=jnp://localhost:1099
java.naming.factory.url.pkgs=org.jboss.naming:org.jnp.interfaces

Here is the application classpath :

jndi.properties
log4j.properties
META-INF\persistence.xml
hibernate-jpa-2.0-api-1.0.0.Final.jar
jnp-client-5.0.3.GA.jar
jboss-common-core-2.2.14.GA.jar
jboss-logging-spi-2.1.0.GA.jar
hibernate-entitymanager-3.6.4.Final.jar
hibernate-core-3.6.4.Final.jar
antlr-2.7.6.jar
commons-collections-3.1.jar
dom4j-1.6.1.jar
hibernate-commons-annotations-3.2.0.Final.jar
jta-1.1.jar
javassist-3.12.0.GA.jar
slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar
slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar
log4j-1.2.16.jar
xstream-1.4.1.jar
xmlpull-1.1.3.1.jar
xpp3_min-1.1.4c.jar

EDIT I have found the source of the problem. The javax.sql.DataSource that was available to my client application was NOT the one received from JNDI. The one I receive from JNDI is the JBoss javax.sql.DataSource. Same name BUT slightly different classes hence the ClassCastException...

As of this writing, the JBoss javax.sql.DataSource can be found in this package : jboss-j2ee-4.2.3.GA.jar

Answer 1

This guide says that you have to set

<use-java-context>false</use-java-context>

in mydatasource-ds.xml. Not sure if you did.

Answer 2

If you get a

javax.naming.Reference 

that means you are missing runtime dependencies that are required for it to resolve. You can inspect the classFactory member of the Reference object via

getFactoryClassName() 

to figure out the first dependency you are missing.

In my case using JBoss6.1 it was:

org.jboss.resource.adapter.jdbc.remote.DataSourceFactory

Putting the jar this class is in on the classpath (common/lib/jbosscx-client.jar) got me past the first step and then it was a matter of tracking down all the ClassNotFoundException errors.

The full list for JBoss6.1 turned out to be:

- client/jnp-client.jar
- client/jboss-logging.jar
- common/lib/jbosscx-client.jar
- client/concurrent.jar
- client/jboss-client.jar
- client/jboss-common-core.jar
- client/jboss-integration.jar
- client/jboss-remoting.jar
- client/jboss-security-spi.jar
- client/jboss-serialization.jar
- client/jboss-transaction-api_1.1_spec.jar