How does maven look for transitive dependency

Question

I have a gradle project A , which I want to export as a library, now I used maven publish plugin to generate pom.xml from its build.gradle . And successfully uploaded to local artifactory.

Now I am able to import it in another project, but the dependencies are not being considered.

For example: My library A has dependencies B and C . When I use A in a project, it doesn't download B and C .

I am assuming I did something wrong in generating A (not proper pom.xml / or any other mistake).

But I want to know, how does Maven, figures transitive dependencies. Like, which files/locations it scans, where it looks for dependencies?

Code

Task for generating pom.xml in project A .

task writeNewPom << {
    pom {
        project {
            groupId 'com.a.b'
            version '1.0.0'
        }
    }.writeTo("src/main/resources/META-INF/maven/com.a.b/feature-store-lib/pom.xml")
}

The location of my pom.xml is in META-INF/maven/com.ab/feature-store-lib/

I am successfully able to upload in artifactory.

I am able to import properly in another gradle project as well, but its transitive dependencies are missing.

Here is the cropped output of gradle dependencies

|    |    \--- org.junit.platform:junit-platform-commons:1.3.1 (*)
|    \--- junit:junit:4.12
|         \--- org.hamcrest:hamcrest-core:1.3
+--- com.a.b:feature-store-lib:0.4
+--- io.github.microutils:kotlin-logging:1.6.22
|    +--- io.github.microutils:kotlin-logging-common:1.6.22

As you can see there is no trasnitive dependencies coming from com.ab:feature-store-lib:0.4

Need ideas to debug.

Answer 1

First of all I'm going to assume that you are producing a pom this way because of some external requirements. Otherwise I would suggest using the publishing plugin as described in the documentation . Publishing to artifactory becomes very easy this way.

My first instinct is that you might have used the wrong configuration in your dependency declaration. If you are using a newer version of gradle you should be using the api configuration for dependencies that need to be exposed to any user of your artifact.

dependencies {
    api 'org.apache.httpcomponents:httpclient:4.5.7' // Exposed
    implementation 'org.apache.commons:commons-lang3:3.5' // Not exposed
}

For more information I refer to the gradle documentation on this subject: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/java_library_plugin.html#sec:java_library_configurations_graph