Whoops! IntelliJ broke my JAAS config…

One of IntelliJ’s features is maintenance of copyright headers in source and text files. The update of the header can be selected to run upon commit (so that your commited code always has the latest copyright!).

/*
* SomeClass.java - 11 Nov 2010
* Copyright (c) 2010 - My Organisation
*/


Kind of cool and useful depending on your coding standards.

I’m updating a module of ours that uses Java Authentication and Authorization service (JAAS) to hook into LDAP.

The JAAS configuration file, unlike most properties and config files, uses Java-style block comments (such as the example above), and not hash comments. IntelliJ has recognized my jaas.config as a properties file, and upon committing to source control, inserts the copyright as a hash-comment block:

#
# jaas.test.config - 11 Nov 2010
# Copyright (c) 2010 - My Organisation
#


The result – My tests fail because JAAS config loader throws an exception!

Solutions?

I hoped that I could somehow indicate that a JAAS config file should be matched to the same style used in Java files.

I can set up a file type for the file easily enough:

But I can’t find a way to apply a copyright template to the file type…damn! The copyright templates seem static.

We could, in theory, apply one of those static file types to out JAAS config file; Add “jaas*.config” to Java or Javascript file types – but you’d have to be willing to put up with the errors and warnings!

For now, using the custom file type will do – IntelliJ doesn’t modify the copyright since it doesn’t know what the file is anymore. At least it won’t update to the wrong format by accident this way..!