BPM/SOA 12c: Symbolic Filebased MDS in Integrated Weblogic

In BPM/SOA projects, we use the MDS all the time, for sharing xsd's and wsdl's between projects.

Since 12cR1 (12.1.3) we have the QuickStart installers for SOA and BPM,  that allows you to create an Integrated Weblogic domain to use for SOASuite and/or BPMSuite.

In most projects we have the contents of the MDS in subversion and of course a check out of that in a local svn working copy.

My whitepaper mentioned in this blog entry describes how you can use the mds in a SOA Suite project from 11g onwards.

But how use the MDS in your integrated weblogic? I would expect that some how 'magically' the integrated weblogic would 'know' of the mds references that I have in the adf-config.xml file in my SOA/BPM Application. But unfortunately it hasn't. That is only used on design/compile time.

Now you could just deploy/sync your MDS to your integrated weblogic as you would do to your test/production server and did on 11g.

But I wouldn't write this blog-entry if I did not find a cool trick: symbolic links, even on Windows.

As denoted by the JDEV_USER_DIR variable your (see also this blog entry), your DefaultDomain would be in 'c:\Data\JDeveloper\SOA\system12.2.1.0.42.151011.0031\DefaultDomain' or 'c:\Users\MAG\AppData\Roaming\JDeveloper\system12.2.1.0.42.151011.0031\DefaultDomain' (on Windows).

Within the  Domain folder you'll find the following folder structure: 'store\gmds\mds-soa\soa-infra'.
 This is apparently the folder that is used for the MDS for SOA and BPM Suite. Within there you'll find the folders:

• deployed-composites
• soa

In there you can create a symbolic link (in Windows a Junctions) named 'apps' and pointing to the folder in your svn working copy that holds the 'oramds://apps'-related content. In Windows this is done like:

C:\...\DefaultDomain\store\gmds\mds-soa\soa-infra>mklink /J apps y:\Generiek\MDS\trunk\SOA\soa-infra\apps

The /J makes it a 'hard symbolic link' or a 'Junction'. Under Linux you woud use 'ln -s ...'.

You'll get a response like:

C:\...\DefaultDomain\store\gmds\mds-soa\soa-infra>Junction created for apps <<===>> y:\Generiek\MDS\trunk\SOA\soa-infra\apps

When you perform a dir you'll see:

c:\Data\JDeveloper\SOA\system12.2.1.0.42.151011.0031\DefaultDomain\store\gmds\mds-soa\soa-infra>dir
 Volume in drive C is System
 Volume Serial Number is E257-B299

 Directory of c:\Data\JDeveloper\SOA\system12.2.1.0.42.151011.0031\DefaultDomain\store\gmds\mds-soa\soa-infra

02-02-2016  12:06    <DIR>          .
02-02-2016  12:06    <DIR>          ..
02-02-2016  12:06    <JUNCTION>     apps [y:\Generiek\MDS\trunk\SOA\soa-infra\apps]
02-02-2016  12:07    <DIR>          deployed-composites
02-02-2016  11:23    <DIR>          soa
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
               5 Dir(s)  18.475.872.256 bytes free

You can just CD to the apps folder and do a DIR there, it will then list the contents of the svn working copy folder of your MDS but just from within your Default Domain.

Just refire your Integrated Domain's DefaultServer and you should be able to deploy your composites that depend on the MDS.