Maven dependency exclusion

Question

I have the following dependency tree:

Project A
   ----Project B
           -----Project D
                 --------Project G
   ----Project C
           -----Project E
                 --------Project H
           -----Project F

The jar of Project G is no longer available and no attempt should be made to download it during build.
The only accessible pom is that of Project A, which contains a dependency of Project B.
So we have added the following in the pom:

<dependency>
      <groupId>xxxxx</groupId>
      <artifactId>Project B</artifactId>
      <version>xxxx</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
      <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
          <artifactId>Project G</artifactId>
          <groupId>xxxxxx</groupId>
        </exclusion>
      </exclusions>
</dependency>

Would adding an exclusion at the higher level of dependency work?
How do we avoid Project G from being downloaded during build?

Answer 1

Yes. Exclusions work at any level. Usually, I would use an exclude for project D instead of B because project D is the direct cause for the dependency.

Note, however, that any other path could still bring in G as dependency because there are no global exclude statements.