Composite provisioning - Advanced

Advanced usage

If the standard features of composite scanner are not enough here are some advanced things toy can do:

Using placeholders

If you are in need to use system properties in your provision specs the the composite files you can do so by using ${property.name}, where the property name is the name of the system property to be replaced as for example user.home. Here is an example of such a file:

scan-bundle:file:${user.home}/my-repository/foo.jar

in this example the ${user.home} will be replaced in my case with /Users/adreghiciu so the actual provisioning spec will be scan-bundle:file:/Users/adreghiciu/my-repository/foo.jar

There are also two special placeholders that you can use that are easier to explain via examples:

• this.relative — If you have the following composite file:
  bar.composite

  scan-bundle:${this.relative}foo.jar
  

  and you access the file via:
  • scan-composite:http://www.somewhere.org/repository/bar.composite the placeholder will be replaced with http://www.somewhere.org/repository resulting in scan-bundle:http://www.somewhere.org/repository/foo.jar
  • scan-composite:file:/Users/adreghiciu/repository/bar.composite the placeholder will be replaced with file:/Users/adreghiciu/repository/ resulting in scan-bundle:/Users/adreghiciu/repository/foo.jar

• this.absolute — If you have the following composite file:
  bar.composite

  scan-bundle:${this.absolute}foo.jar
  

  and you access the file via:
  • scan-composite:http://www.somewhere.org/repository/bar.composite the placeholder will be replaced with http://www.somewhere.org/ resulting in scan-bundle:http://www.somewhere.org/foo.jar
  • scan-composite:file:/Users/adreghiciu/my-repository/bar.composite the placeholder will be replaced with file:/ resulting in scan-bundle:/foo.jar

Relative URLs

Sometimes you do not want to hardcode absolute urls in your composite file but