updateParent ERRORs when plugin is executed via Jenkins CI (mvn io.github.pmckeown...)

[software-testing-professional]

In my customer project we are using the dependency-track-maven-plugin via Jenkins pipeline library, as one of the Jenkins pipeline steps.
Therefore we use a generic plugin configuration like this:

mvn io.github.pmckeown:dependency-track-maven-plugin:1.10.0:upload-bom
            -Ddependency-track.dependencyTrackBaseUrl="${dependencyTrackBaseUrl}"
            -Ddependency-track.apiKey="${dtrackApiKey}"
            -Ddependency-track.verifySsl=false
            -Ddependency-track.updateProjectInfo=true
            -Ddependency-track.projectName="${project.artifactId}"
            -Ddependency-track.projectVersion="${revision}-SNAPSHOT"
            -Ddependency-track.parentVersion="${project.parent.version}"
            -Ddependency-track.projectTags="${projectName}"
            -Ddependency-track.parentName="${project.parent.artifactId}"
            -Ddependency-track.updateParent=true
            -Ddependency-track.bomLocation="target/bom.json"

The idea behind is, to keep this whole activity outside all our Maven projects. And instead enforce it via Jenkins CI.

Most of our Maven artifacts do have a parent - but some don't.

In case we do have a parent, everything works fine:
[INFO] Attempting to fetch project parent: ...

But if we don't have a parent, the plugin throws an error.
[ERROR] Parent update requested but no parent found in parent maven project or provided in config

Is there any way to solve this? And prevent the plugin from throwing an ERROR if there is no parent?
I'd appreciate your help.

Regards, Michael

[elmuerte]

It's because dependency-track.updateParent is set to true, which instructs the plugin to update the parent. However, neither a parent name (as ${project.parent.artifactId} resolves to a blank value) or parent UUID is provided. So the plugin cannot update the parent (which it is instructed to do).

The updateParent setting requires a boolean value. In maven expressions are coerced to the specific type. For boolean values the string value must be true (case insensitive). Sadly there is no expression which you could use which would return true if the project has a parent.

You could make use of maven's help:evaluate and a sh step capturing the out in jenkins:

[[ $(mvn help:evaluate -q -DforceStdout=true -Dexpression=project.parent/) == "null/" ]] && echo false || echo true

That would print true if the project has a parent, and false otherwise.

Note: project.parent/ looks like a weird expression. But this would evaluate the part before / as an expression, and then append the rest to the value of the string. Otherwise with project.parent as expression you would need to check for the error message which is printed, which might change.

[software-testing-professional]

Sorry for my late answer.

Instead of running dependency-track-maven-plugin on the whole project, I would then process each folder (project root + all Maven Module folders) separately.
And do the mvn help:evaluate check upfront.
Depending on the result I could then run the dependency-track-maven-plugin with or without parent-related options.

This would cover all edge cases like

• Maven root project has no parent, and it's submodules have root project as parent
• Maven root project has parent, but some of it's submodules have no parent (rare, but we have that for specific reasons)
• etc.

This sounds like a feasable solution for my use case. Thank you! :-)