Disabling tag sets

You have the option of disabling tag sets within a Java™ class, and the annotations are not processed at run time.

Before you begin

When you make a custom change to the properties of an element in the Deployment Descriptor editor, the annotations that could potentially overwrite these customs changes are disabled.

About this task

Any section of the deployment descriptor that has been generated through annotated source can be maintained at a given point in time by either the annotations themselves or the descriptor file, not both. The concept of disabled tag sets allows the preservation of changes when the descriptor file is being used for edits. If you change an element in your application through the Deployment Descriptor, you are asked whether you want to disable the annotations within the Java source code.

Procedure

  1. Expand your project name and double click the Deployment Descriptor.
  2. This opens the Deployment Descriptor editor. You might want to change the properties of a particular element in your application. For example, you can change the type of the Session Bean from "stateless" to "stateful":

    Change Java bean properties

  3. When you make this change in the Deployment Descriptor editor, you are asked whether you want to disable the annotations:

    Confirm disabling tags

    This dialog box asking whether you would like to disable the annotations box appears only when you are using the design page editor, not the source page editor.

  4. If you select Cancel, no changes are made to the state of the bean. If you say OK, the state is changed, and the annotations are disabled.

  5. Look at the Java source code for this object, and the statement // @annotations-disabled tagSet="ejb" is displayed at the top of the file.

    Disabled tag set code

  6. A source file can have multiple disabled comments, one for each different tag set that has been disabled.
  7. If you want to go back to using annotations, then you simply remove the appropriate comment from the Java source file, and save. The annotations reprocess and overwrite custom changes that have been made in the Deployment Descriptor.

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