Plugging 3rd party jars into DiffKit

With the 0.8.10 release, you can add third-party jars to DiffKit. DiffKit will recognize JDBC drivers found in those jars, as well as custom Sources, Sinks, and Diffors.

The DiffKit distribution includes a directory "dropin". It’s directly under the DIFFKIT_HOME directory, which is normally the same directory that the diffkit-app.jar is in after you have unzipped the binary download. The directory in the distribution is empty. Any extra jars that you want DiffKit to recognized you can simply copy into the dropin directory. DiffKit will automatically load all jars within dropin each time it runs. Note well that the only archive type that DiffKit recognizes is jar-- it does not recognize zip, war, ear, etc.

All jars within dropin are loaded before any of the third-party jars that are embedded within DiffKit. That means you can override JDBC drivers that are part of the DiffKit binary distribution. You might need to do this in the case of HyperSQL DB, where the version of the JDBC driver must match the version of the DB server. You might also want to add a new JDBC driver in the case where the vendor supplies a newer version of the driver than the one that DiffKit embeds, and that newer version is higher performance.

The principal use for dropins is to allow the user to write custom Source/Sink/Diffor java classes, and then plug those custom implementations into DiffKit. Source/Sink/Diff are documented in the User Guide. Those three key abstractions are represented as Java Interfaces within DiffKit. You can write your own Java classes that implement those Interfaces. You will need to use a PassthroughPlan to reference the custom classes, because MagicPlan does not recognize them. Custom classes are referenced within the Passthrough plan in exactly the same way that DiffKit native classes are.

As a trivial example of a custom Sink, the DiffKit source distribution includes class org.diffkit.contrib.DKSimpleCustomSink. org.diffkit.contrib is a package that is not included in the binary distribution. You can plug that custom Sink into your plan with, for instance, this specification:

...
<bean id="plan" class="org.diffkit.diff.conf.DKPassthroughPlan">
   <property name="lhsSource" ref="lhs.source" />
   <property name="rhsSource" ref="rhs.source" />
   <property name="sink" ref="customSink" />
   <property name="tableComparison" ref="table.comparison" />
</bean>
...
<bean id="customSink" class="org.diffkit.contrib.DKSimpleCustomSink">
   <constructor-arg index="0" value="./custom_report.diff" />
</bean>
...

Having DiffKit recognize your custom Sink is simply a matter of compiling and archiving the org.diffkit.contrib.DKSimpleCustomSink into a jar file, and the dropping that jar file into the dropin directory.