This post isn't so much a part of the current series as it is a followup to a post from the other week, but I can conceptually retcon that one in as a prologue. This will also be a good quick tip for dealing with Maven projects.

In my previous post, I described how I copied the built native shared library from the C++ project into the OSGi fragments for distribution, and I left it with the really hacky approach of copying the file using a project-relative path that reached up into the other project. It technically functioned, but it relied on the specific project structure, which wouldn't survive any reorganization or breaking up of the module tree.

To improve it, I reworked it to be a bit more Maven-y, which involves two steps: attaching the built artifacts to the output of the native project and then using the dependency plugin to copy the native artifacts in as needed. For the first step, I used the build-helper-maven-plugin, though there may be other ways to do it. This is relatively straightfoward, though:

<plugin>
	<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
	<artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
	<version>1.3</version>
	<executions>
		<execution>
			<id>attach-artifacts</id>
			<phase>package</phase>
			<goals>
				<goal>attach-artifact</goal>
			</goals>
			<configuration>
				<artifacts>
					<artifact>
						<file>${project.basedir}/x64/Debug/nativelib-win32-x64.dll</file>
						<type>dll</type>
						<classifier>win32-x64</classifier>
					</artifact>
					<artifact>
						<file>${project.basedir}/Win32/Debug/nativelib-win32-x86.dll</file>
						<type>dll</type>
						<classifier>win32-x86</classifier>
					</artifact>
				</artifacts>
			</configuration>
		</execution>
	</executions>
</plugin>

This causes the native libraries - so far, the two Windows ones - to be included in the Maven repository during installation, and to then be accessible from other projects. The files are named using the module base name plus the classifier appended and the type as the file extension, like native-project-name-win32-x64.dll.

To copy that artifact into the OSGi bundle project, I then use maven-dependency-plugin to copy it in. Here I reference it via the module name and the classifier/type pair used above (with some shorthands because they're in the same multi-module project):

<plugin>
	<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
	<artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
	<version>2.10</version>
	
	<executions>
		<execution>
			<id>copy-native-lib</id>
			<phase>prepare-package</phase>
			<goals>
				<goal>copy</goal>
			</goals>
			<configuration>
				<artifactItems>
					<artifactItem>
						<groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
						<artifactId>native-project-name</artifactId>
						<version>${project.version}</version>
						<type>dll</type>
						<classifier>win32-x64</classifier>
					</artifactItem>
				</artifactItems>
				<outputDirectory>lib</outputDirectory>
				<stripVersion>true</stripVersion>
			</configuration>
		</execution>
	</executions>
</plugin>

The net result here is the same as previously, but should be more maintainable.