[JNDI] Services Specification issues about design

[bjhargrave]

Comment author: Ivan Dubrov <[email protected]>

The full issue in question is at https://mail.osgi.org/pipermail/osgi-dev/2010-September/002638.html

Sometimes JNDI provider calls getObjectInstance providing "resolved"
object (not a reference, javax.naming.Reference), for example instance
of JMS javax.jms.ConnectionFactory. According to the 126.4/6 [1], my
implementation of JNDIProviderAdmin tries to convert object with all
possible factories. The problem is that most JBoss factories expect
object passed to be javax.naming.Reference, so ClassCastException is
thrown. According to the specification (see the end of the 126.4 [2]),
the exception must be propagated to the caller, breaking the JNDI
resolution.

[1] Snippet from the OSGi Service Platform Release 4, Enterprise
Specification 4.2, section 126.4/6:

If the description was a Reference and without a factory class name
specified, or if the description was not of type Reference, then
attempt to convert the object with each Object Factory service (or Dir
Object Factory service for directories) service in ranking order until a
non-null value is returned.

[2] Exceptions handling:

If an Exception occurs during the use of an Object Factory Builder
service then this exception should be logged but must be ignored. If,
however, an Exception occurs during the calling of a found ObjectFactory
or DirObjecFactory object then this Exception must be re-thrown to the
caller of the JNDI Provider Admin service.

To sum up:

Faulty ObjectFactory can break JNDI resolution completely, even when client tries to resolve completely valid references implemented by different provider.