Question

I would like to be able to determine what versions I am running of a dependency at runtime as well as the version of the web application itself.

Each web application I deploy is packaged with a pom.xml which I can read from, that part is trivial. The next part is parsing the pom without much effort.

As the web application is running, I want to be able to understand what version I am, and what versions my dependencies are.

Ideally, I would like to do something like:

MavenPom pom = new MavenPom(webApplicationPomInputStream);
pom.getVersion();
pom.getArtifactId();
pom.getGroupId();

for(Dependency dependency:pom.getDependencies())
{
  dependency.getVersion();
  dependency.getArtifactId();
  dependency.getGroupId();
}

Should I just use XPath notation here, or is there a library I can call to do this type of thing?

After these posts, I am thinking the quickest/most reliable way is to generate a text file with the dependency tree in it: mvn dependency:tree. Then I will parse the text file, separate the groupId, artifactId, and version, and then determine the structure by the indentation level.

If I do that, can I export to XML instead of text? I can then use JAXB and easily parse that file without doing any/much work.

It is a hack, but looks promising.

Walter

Answer 1

I will just use the mvn dependency:tree plugin to generate a text file with the dependency tree. Then I will parse that in and create the dependency tree/graph from that. I will get the scope of the artifact, groupId, artifactId, version, and its parent.

I successfully implemented this type of lookup, it simply takes the dependency output, parses it and organizes dependencies simply using the indentation, nothing fancy. The artifact, group, version, and scope are easily parsed since the separator is a :.

Walter