TomEE and JPA DataSources

2 min readJun 16, 2019

This short article shows the different places DataSources can be defined for web applications using JEE running in a TomEE server.

The situation

In order that your @PersistenceContext knows against which database it should connect, you have a META-INF/persistence.xml which defines a persistence-unit which defines a jta-data-source:

META-INF/persistence.xml<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence
        http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_2.xsd"
 version="2.2">
   
   <persistence-unit name="PersUnitName" transaction-type="JTA"> 
      <jta-data-source>jdbc/mydatabase</jta-data-source>
   </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

Finally the database connection must be put into JNDI under jdbc/mydatabase or to be more precise under java:comp/env/openejb/Resource/<CONTEXT>/jdbc/mydatabase.

Where DataSources can be defined

In JEE 6 or later DataSources can be defined in

a <data-source> in $WEBAPP/WEB-INF/web.xml (or application.xml, application-client.xml, ejb-jar.xml)
a @DataSourceDefinition in one of your Java classes

Tomcat adds DataSource definitions under some more locations [1]:

as a <Resource> inside <GlobalNamingResources> in $TOMCAT/conf/server.xml
as a <Resource> inside <Context> in $WEBAPP/META-INF/context.xml
as a <Resource> inside <Context> in $TOMCAT/conf/Catalina/localhost/mypath.xml
as a <Resource> inside <Context> in $TOMCAT/conf/server.xml

TomEE adds even more DataSource definition locations [2]:

as a <Resource> inside $TOMEE/conf/tomee.xml
as a <Resource> inside $WEBAPP/WEB-INF/resources.xml
as a list of key=value entries in $TOMEE/conf/system.properties
as a “-D” command-line option

The bad news

Defining the <Resource> at any location in a <Context> does add a DataSource object into JDNI, but it doesn’t work for your application - this bug is files under https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TOMEE-263

I came up with a (maybe too simple) solution.

DataSource definitions in some detail

As we have seen DataSources can be defined in various locations, unfortunately they have different formats.

Under META-INF/context.xml (or any other “context”) it looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context><Resource name="jdbc/mydatabase" auth="Container"
  type="javax.sql.DataSource" username="root" password=""
  driverClassName="com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver"
  url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/myschema" /></Context>

While in WEB-INF/resources.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<tomee>

<Resource id="jdbc/mydatabase" type="DataSource">
   JdbcDriver = com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver
   JdbcUrl = jdbc:mysql://localhost/myschema
   UserName = root
</Resource>

</tomee>

So long story short, make sure you are using the right format at the right place.

Links:

[1] https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/jndi-resources-howto.html
[2] http://tomee.apache.org/datasource-config.html