Bundle a Common Jar Into EJB Jar with Maven Plugin maven-ejb-plugin

Yesterday I had some problem with packing an EJB3 jar with Maven plugin maven-ejb-plugin. The problem seemed quite common. To bundle a common jar dependency into an EJB jar, but after reading the documentation for the maven-ejb-plugin at http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-ejb-plugin/, it seemed clear that the plugin lacked this capability. After several hour of failure I ran into a workaround . Instead of configure the maven-ejb-plugin I used the maven-dependency-plugin to copy the desired dependency jar into the target/classes directory and then configure maven-dependency-plugin to run before the package phase.

<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-ejb-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<generateClient>false</generateClient>
<ejbVersion>3.0</ejbVersion>
</configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>copy-dependencies</id>
<phase>process-classes</phase>
<goals>
<goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<includeGroupIds>se.msc.development</includeGroupIds>
<includeArtifactIds>common</includeArtifactIds>
<outputDirectory>${project.build.outputDirectory}</outputDirectory>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

And if you need to add the common.jar to the classpath in the MANIFEST file add the following configuration to maven-ejb-plugin.

<archive>
<manifest>
<addclasspath>true</addclasspath>
</manifest>
<manifestfile>${project.build.outputDirectory}/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF</manifestfile>
</archive>