War plugin doesn't let modify the contents of the "exploded" directory

That does not sound a bug to me. The problem you're having is that the war plugin does not run in the "prepare-package" phase and hence you cannot hook into it. That's why you're invoking the plugin manually which is useless since the default profile will kick in and the package phase will call the war plugin again (you can see that in the logs). And this call of course is a regular call which will do without your custom changes.

But there is a two different behaviour between different versions of the war plugin. For example, this behaviour was different in 2.1-beta-1. If you modify war plugin version of the pom.xml, you can easily see that war plugin does not touch modified files. Please let me know after trying since this issue is a serious block for us for updating our war plugin. In many of our projects we are using such kind of pre-processing before package phase. Thanks

Hi,

It seems that default configuration of the war plugin changed. To make expected behaviour as in this example cache parameter should be activated.

 
<plugin>
	<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
	<version>2.1.1</version>
	<executions>
		<execution>
			<phase>generate-resources</phase>
			<goals>
				<goal>exploded</goal>
			</goals>
		</execution>
	</executions>
	<configuration>
		<useCache>true</useCache>
	</configuration>
</plugin> 
 

By the way at maven mail list Marc helped me to solve this problem.

http://maven.40175.n5.nabble.com/War-plugin-2-1-beta-1-problem-td3384365.html#a3385808

I don't see what the useCache parameter has anything to do with this.

Without use cache directive, war plugin is replacing modified files which are modified at another phase. Use cache is protecting files which are modified at another phases.

Without use cache

1) Copy files with war:exploded
2) Modify them with replace plugin
3) Replace all files at target folder with war:war at package phase.

this is completely deleting modified files with are enhanced with another plugin

With use cache

1) Copy files with war:exploded
2) Modify them with replace plugin
3) War:war without deleting modified files

And as a result of this, It lets us for pre-processing before package phase at exploded folder.

It would be good to see this fixed. Is there any rules to patch proposal?