Quartz Resourceadapter: Quartz with JDBC-Jobstore (required for Clustering) leads to NPE in QuartzJob

For our customer we need clustered quartz-timers. This requires a JDBC-Jobstore (see http://wiki.opensymphony.com/display/QRTZ1/TutorialLesson11).

Using a JDBC-Jobstore leads to the following exception:

16:46:40,046 ERROR [JobRunShell] Job default.job.0.1169048021109 threw an unhandled Exception:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.jboss.resource.adapter.quartz.inflow.QuartzJob.execute(QuartzJob.java:53)
at org.quartz.core.JobRunShell.run(JobRunShell.java:203)
at org.quartz.simpl.SimpleThreadPool$WorkerThread.run(SimpleThreadPool.java:520)

This is what we've done:

1. installed jBoss 4.0.5 GA with ejb3 clustered profile

2. created a quartz.properties in directory <jboss-home>/server/default/conf (see attached file)

3. added a quartz-ds.xml to <jboss-home>/server/default/deploy (using a mySQL-database) (see attached file)

4. moved the file quartz-ra.rar from <jboss-home>/server/default/deploy to <jboss-home>/server/default/deploy/deploy.last (to ensure, that the JDBC-datasource is already bound to JNDI when the resource-adapater is deployed)

5. added the mysql-JDBC-Driver to <jboss-home>/server/default/lib

6. created the database-tables required by quartz using the script tables_mysql_innodb.sql (part of the quartz 1.5.2 distribution)

7. created a simple test MDB (see attached files TestJob.java and ejb3test.jar) and deployed it to directory <jboss-home>/server/default/deploy/deploy.last

8. started jBoss => you can see the NPE every 10 seconds

I've debugged a little bit. This is, what I've found so far:

• If a JobStoreTX is used as JobStore, the class JobStoreTX uses StdJDBCDelegate.insertJobDetail(..) to store the JobDetails in the database. The method insertJobDetail(...) serializes the JobDataMap into a ByteArrayOutputStream. The method endpointActivation(..) of class org.jboss.resource.adapter.quartz.inflow.QuartzResourceAdapter adds a reference to the MessageEndpointFactory to the JobDataMap (using the key "endpointFactory"). Since the MessageEndpointFactory is not serializable, the MessageEndpointFactory is not stored in the JDBC-Jobstore !

• The method execute(...) of org.jboss.resource.adapter.quartz.inflow.QuartzJob retrieves the "endpointFactory" from the JobDataMap (which returns null, because it was not serialized). In line 53 the method createEndpoint(..) is called on a null-object => NPE