Wednesday 29 May 2013

The hierarchy of the type X is inconsistent - A Classpath Issue

Often the simple things will slow you down when developing.
Today I had one such moment. It occurred a few days back where my Eclipse project was reporting the following error:

The hierarchy of the type LoggingFilter is inconsistent

The LoggingFilter was simply a class extending the Spring AbstractRequestLoggingFilter



Nothing really special was going on. I was kind of hoping it would be obvious but it wasn't.

In short, my classpath was wrong where I had an import that did not (was older perhaps) match to a library that, somewhere in the stack, AbstractRequestLoggingFilter was depending on.

I frequently used mvn dependency:tree to assess what this list was .. and nothing stood out. I checked the javax.servlet-api (yes I was using 3.0.1, and so was Spring). I checked my exclusion of commons logging (I use SLF4J), but that was okay.

Eventually I looked inside the .classpath and to my mild horror I saw Spring 3.0.6 was included.
Looking back at the dependency:tree for Maven, it didn't show in the list.

Which meant one of two things:
1. mvn dependency:tree was wrong
2. mvn eclipse:eclipse was wrong

I looked first at dependency:tree, and then figured that perhaps Maven needed an update (I was using 3.0.4) and that took me to check release notes, of which I found : https://cwiki.apache.org/MAVEN/maven-3x-compatibility-notes.html#Maven3.xCompatibilityNotes-DependencyResolution

and a magic note that , dependency:tree does not work according to maven's resolution.
So no worries, I ran debug and I saw that .. yes Maven was "seeing" 3.0.6 but it was also excluding it.
So that meant that eclipse:eclipse was wrong.. a quick pom change and (2.9 eclipse plugin) and it was all good.

mvn eclipse:eclipse excluded 3.0.6 as expected and included 3.2.3 as needed.

Jetty however is still bootstrapping with 3.0.6 .. so I may have to specifically find which of the depenedencies is trying to include it, exclude it and then forcibly include spring-context.. rather than rely on the transitive.

Moral to the post .. check everything .. and assume nothing! 

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