Most often you will use Jawr to minify the resources that get bundled onto a file. This means that all comments will be removed from the source and served to clients in that form. However, if you use open source libraries you are normally required to include some sort of license with them. Also, you may want to include your own copyright and license terms with your resources. This kind of licensing data always comes in the form of source comments, but if they are written in your resources, minification will delete them. To solve this problem, you can use the license files feature in Jawr.
A license file is simply a file named .license that contains comments with licensing info, either yours or from of an open source library. Its content is copied verbatim to the top of the generated bundle file. Therefore you must be careful to have only well formed comments in this file or errors may arise in your bundles. Also, the license file must use the same encoding as your resources to prevent problems when creating the bundle. As an example, this would be the content of the license file we should add to any bundle containing the Prototype.js library:
/* Prototype JavaScript framework, version 1.6.0 * (c) 2005-2007 Sam Stephenson * * Prototype is freely distributable under the terms of an MIT-style license. * For details, see the Prototype web site: http://www.prototypejs.org/ * *--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
In order to be able to use the license files, you must have the licenses postprocessor active. Normally you don’t have to do anything for this to happen since it is on by default, but keep it in mind if you customize the postprocessors.
A license file can be included explicitly as part of a mapping, or implicitly by placing it in a mapped directory. For example, if you had this directory structure:
you could map as follows:
...
jawr.js.bundle.fooBundle.id=/bundles/fooBundle.js
jawr.js.bundle.fooBundle.mappings=/someDir/**
jawr.js.bundle.barBundle.id=/bundles/barBundle.js
jawr.js.bundle.barBundle.mappings=/bar.js, /.license
In the case of fooBundle, the license is included implicitly because of the fact that it is within a mapped directory. Such mapping (/someDir/**) would include any license file in any subdirectory of someDir as well.
If more than one file in the same directory requires a license, you simply add both of them to the same license file.
For barBundle, the license is explicitly added to the mapping. Note that even though normally the order of files added to a bundle corresponds to the order in which you map them, licenses will be at the top of the file regardless of its position in the mapping.