My EAR consists out of an common-jar, an EJB-jar and a WAR. The WAR uses a spring context, so it is dependend on the spring-namespace description files in the META-INF direcotry.
My WAR/jboss-deployment-structure.xml contains
<module name="org.springfw">
<imports>
<include path="META-INF**" />
<include path="org**" />
</imports>
</module>
If i deploy the EAR and the WAR seperatly, the application works perfectly.
By deploying the same WAR inside of the EAR it fails with a ClassNotFoundException (org.spring...ContextLoaderListener).
Well, i edited my WAR/META-INF/Manifest.MF and added "Dependencies: org.springfw", the application fails on startup with:
Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for XML schema namespace [http://www.springframework.org/schema/context]
This means the classes are available, but not the META-INF files.
To sum it up: If i deploy a WAR inside an EAR, i can still import modules via the Manifest of the WAR (works, but cant import the META-INF directory), but the WEB-INF/jboss-deployment-structure.xml will always be ignored.
EDIT:
The module descriptor is
<resource-root path="spring-context-3.2.10.RELEASE.jar">
<filter>
<include path="META-INF**" />
<include path="org**" />
</filter>
</resource-root>