Access WebSphere Variables in J2EE Applications

02 April 2007

Accessing WebSphere Variables from inside your J2EE application isn't as easy as it looks. They're not environment variables or system properties, but a portion of the WebSphere configuration that is used by the WebSphere Application Server Runtime.

You can access these variables by invoking an operation on "AdminOperations" MBean as follows:

try
{
    AdminService adminService = AdminServiceFactory.getAdminService();
    ObjectName queryName = new ObjectName( "WebSphere:*,type=AdminOperations" );
    Set objs = adminService.queryNames( queryName, null );
    if ( !objs.isEmpty() )
    {
        ObjectName thisObj = (ObjectName)objs.iterator().next();
        String opName = "expandVariable";
        String signature[] = { "java.lang.String" };
        String params[] = { "${VARIABLE_NAME}" } ;
        Object retVal = adminService.invoke( thisObj, opName, params, signature );
        System.out.println( retVal );
    }
} catch (MalformedObjectNameException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (InstanceNotFoundException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (MBeanException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (ReflectionException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

This code will only work from an application running inside the server.