Question

I have a 3rd party dependency in my project, which refer to its dependencies with open-ended version reference:

<version>[4.0,)</version>

How I can override this in my project so my dependency doesn’t use versions of its dependency later than specific version, 6.0 for example? ( versions later than 6.0 require some other packages I do not want at all )

Answer 1

If you specify the transitive dependency explicitly in your project, the version you specify will take precedence.

For example. In your POM add the dependency on com.foo:bar with a version range with an exclusive upper limit like this:

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.foo</groupId>
    <artifactId>bar</artifactId>
    <version>[4.0,6.0)</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Update(2): I just tested this and it does work (I just had a typo in my test project). Here’s my test explanation.

I have 3 test projects: test-base, test-dependency, and test-transitive.
The test-base project has a direct dependency on test-dependency, test-dependency has an open-ended dependency on test-transitive.
I have 3 versions of test-transitive installed, 0.0.1, 1.0.1, and 2.0.1
If I do dependency:tree on test-base I see this:

name.seller.rich:test-base:jar:0.0.1
\- name.seller.rich:test-dependency:jar:0.0.1:compile
   \- name.seller.rich:test-transitive:jar:2.0.1:compile

If I add an explicit dependency on test-transitive in test-base with the dependency range set to [0.0.1,2.0.0), I get this tree instead:

name.seller.rich:test-base:jar:0.0.1
+- name.seller.rich:test-dependency:jar:0.0.1:compile
\- name.seller.rich:test-transitive:jar:1.0.1:compile