Using the MDS

One of the nice new features of Oracle SOA Suite 11g is the MDS (Metadata Services). The MDS is a unified store for metadata. When for example a BPEL process is deployed, it's put in the MDS. This store can also be used among other things to share common artifacts such as XSD's, EDL (Event Definition Language) and WSDL files. The MDS provides a more secure, better maintainable alternative to putting these artifacts on (for example) a webserver. JDeveloper also supports browsing the MDS directly and the MDS can be imported and exported from the Enterprise Manager. 

Updating the MDS however on a per application basis, can not be done directly from JDeveloper without some additional scripts.

Because Ant scripts to make working with the MDS easier, are already available, I will not repeat those sources and just point out what I needed to do to make those examples work with my installation of  JDeveloper 11.1.1.5. Edwin Biemond has provided a base script on http://biemond.blogspot.com/2009/11/soa-suite-11g-mds-deploy-and-removal.html. A tutorial describing an implementation of scripts similar to the base example, can be found on; http://technology.amis.nl/blog/15295/using-the-metadata-services-in-a-soa-environment-part-1

To make the script from the tutorial work from JDeveloper I had to do two things;
- download ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ant-contrib/files/
- create a libs directory and add the folowing lines to the build.xml file;

<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties">
  <classpath>
   <pathelement location="../libs/ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar" />
   </classpath>
</taskdef>

For reference you can download my test project. I've removed the servername, user, password in the env.dev.properties. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6693935/mds-store.zip