How to avoid maven WTP enabled project automatically generates web.xml? - eclipse

Question

I have setup multi-modules environment with Maven, Eclipse, WTP.
The Eclipse Plugins I installed are:
m2e
m2e-extras
m2e-overlay
I have a war module(w2) that depends on another war module(w1), w1 has a web.xml file, and w2 doesn't have it's own, it uses overlay web.xml from w1. Whenever I click maven -> Update project configuration, eclipse automatically generates an empty web.xml for w2 which I really don't want.
How can I disable this?

Answer 1

By default, m2e-wtp specifically asks WTP to not generate a web.xml if none exists and adds the Dynamic Web Facet 2.5 by default (or 3.0 if some JavaEE 6 dependencies are detected in the classpath).
The only reason WTP would create the web.xml would be if we asked to install a facet version <=2.4. But these facets can only be inferred from an existing web.xml. See the irony?
So what you see is most likely a bug and you might want to create a bug report with a sample project attached to https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/MECLIPSEWTP
In the mean time you can try to use a dev build of m2e-wtp 0.14.0, available from http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/builds/staging/m2eclipse-wtp-e37/all/repo/, as I recently made changes in the way Dynamic Facet version changes are handled.
And as for the overlay exclusion configuration described in the first reply, that wouldn't work for you since you want to specifically use w1's web.xml, not exclude it. I would rather invert the overlay order like :
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<overlays>
<overlay>
<groupId>foo.bar</groupId>
<artifactId>w1</artifactId>
</overlay>
<overlay>
<!-- this is the current w2,
it's resources will be overridden by w1
-->
</overlay>
</overlays>
</configuration>
</plugin>

Answer 2

What you can do is - explicitly exclude the dependent module's web.xml and while packaging, it will pick the xml from the parent war:
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<overlays>
<!-- Overlay w2 WAR with w1 specific web.xml -->
<overlay>
<groupId>xyz</groupId>
<artifactId>w1</artifactId>
<excludes>
<exclude>WEB-INF/web.xml</exclude>
</excludes>
</overlay>
</overlays>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
Cheers!