It’s almost a tradition now in this blog posting fixes to common Exceptions, so here is another one

This one goes to people using JBoss Portlet Bridge 2.0.0.CR1 (don’t know about other versions). The stacktrace is the following:

 Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: LifecycleId already added for id: SEAM_PORTLET.
         at com.sun.faces.lifecycle.LifecycleFactoryImpl.addLifecycle(LifecycleFactoryImpl.java:199)
         at org.jboss.portletbridge.lifecycle.PortletLifecycleFactory.addLifecycle(PortletLifecycleFactory.java:60)
         at org.jboss.portletbridge.lifecycle.PortletLifecycleFactory.(PortletLifecycleFactory.java:48)
         ... 195 more

The long history:

Portlet Bridge uses a custom JSF Lifecycle for handling behaviour specific to portlets. It does so by means of a embedded faces-config.xml in it’s jar. The problem is that it tries to add this SEAM_PORTLET even if it already exists. That means that having 2 Portlet Bridges JAR in your application’s classpath will cause confusion.

That raises a not so trivial scenario. Even tho you have only one Portlet Bridge JAR, depending on how your JBoss classloading configuration is set, this Exception can occur. That’s because JBoss uses temporary folders to unpack Javar Archives in it’s <JBOSS_HOME>/server/default/tmp (or whatever configuration you are using). These folders have unique auto-generated names, so between startups your WAR may be unpacked to a folder in tmp while there’s already an older version there with a different name.

The short history:

Delete your JBoss configuration’s tmp and work (don’t worry, it’s safe) folder or search for some duplicated portletbridge-impl.jar.

Reference: JIRA