Custom SBT Build file to not compile views in Play 2.0 - scala

Question

I have a Play 1.2.4 app that I'm trying to migrate to Play 2.0.2. I currently have a structure in Play 1.2.4 like this:
Website depends on Frontend
Catalog depends on Frontend
Frontend depends on (a routes file being defined when compiling views)
Where Frontend contains a bunch of views that are used by both Website and Catalog. This decision was made because Catalog is really lightweight and is used for quick development of Frontend. While Website has a lot more code in it and takes longer to code/compile/test.
I cannot setup these projects as subprojects like is decribed here http://www.playframework.org/documentation/2.0/SBTSubProjects because there is a circular dependency. The views use Asset.of which requires the routes file to be defined. But the Website and Catalog each define a routes file and Play 2.0 does not support routes files from dependencies (this is supposed to come in Play 2.1). And in the Catalog the views are referenced in the controllers.
I was thinking that if I could change my build logic for Frontend to not try to compile the views, but instead just publish an artifact containing them then I could have Website and Catalog add those artifacts to the views it defines and build them together. This would break the circular dependency I have.
Has anyone else done this before? I'm too much of a beginner with SBT to even know if this is possible. Could anyone tell me how I could modify the Build.scala file to stop compiling the views but export them instead? Would it make sense for me to make this an SBT plugin? Of if you know of any code that shows how to do this another could you post a link to the code?

Answer 1

I used the play new to create two projects. The LDAPInterface was an interface to LDAP that we wanted to use across several applications. The Second Project was the Access manger. In the AccessManager\project\build.scala file, we structured it this way in order to use the LDAPInterface project. In eclipse, we just included the LDAPInterface in the project dependency section so we could debug. You could always compile a jar file and include that, but ... not as good if you want to drill down on project dependencies within eclipse. If we used play.Project it recognized it as a web project. If we just used Project it seemed to think it was a console application.
import sbt._
import Keys._
import play.Project._
object LDAPInterface {
lazy val depProject = RootProject(file("../LDAPInterface"))
}
object ApplicationBuild extends Build {
val appName = "AccessManager"
val appVersion = "1.0-SNAPSHOT"
val appDependencies = Seq(
//Add your project dependencies here,
javaCore,
javaJdbc,
javaEbean
)
// lazy val root = Project(id = "AccessManager",
// base = file(".")
//).dependsOn(LDAPInterface.depProject)
lazy val main = play.Project(appName, appVersion, appDependencies).settings(
// Add your own project settings here
).dependsOn(LDAPInterface.depProject)
}