Exclude Package From Gradle Dependency

Question

I'm experiencing an issue where multiple versions of the same class are showing up in my classpath. The class in question is javax.ws.rs.core.UriBuilder. The version I want to use is brought in by javax.ws.rs:javax.ws.rs-api:2.0.1. However, we also use the Jira rest client library which has a dependency on the older version of jersey (com.sun.jersey:jersey-core) which has included the java.ws packages bundled in it's jar.

Here is an example snippet from the build file:

dependencies {
  compile 'com.atlassian.jira:jira-rest-java-client-core:2.0.0-m31'
  compile 'javax.ws.rs:javax.ws.rs-api:2.0.1'
  compile 'org.glassfish.jersey.core:jersey-client:2.17'
}

I can't remove com.sun.jersey:jersey-core as it uses different package name from the new version and would cause class def not found exceptions in the Jira client.

As far as I can tell, my options at this point are:

1. Revert to using Jersey 1.x and it's implementation of jsr311
2. Somehow have gradle exclude the javax.ws package from the old jersey client.

I'd like to keep using the newer version of jersey so #2 would be my ideal solution but I'm not sure if it's even possible. Does anyone know how to go about this? If that's not possible, I'm open to other suggestions.

Answer 1

You can exclude an transitive dependency module like this:

   compile ('org.glassfish.jersey.core:jersey-client:2.17') {
      exclude group: 'javax.ws.rs'
      exclude module: 'javax.ws.rs-api'
   }

ref: 50.4.7 here

Answer 2

I found out that com.sun.jersey:jersey-core:1.19 doesn't bundle the javax.ws.rs class files and instead lists them as a compile-time dependency. Adding this snippet to my build.gradle fixed the issue.

configurations.all {
  resolutionStrategy {
    // For a version that doesn't package javax.ws
    force 'com.sun.jersey:jersey-core:1.19' 
  }
}