Deploying EAR File with Application Configured for ADF User & Site Customizations Fails

Earlier, I attempted to deploy an EAR file from a vendor on WebLogic but it failed with the following error.

 weblogic.application.ModuleException: :oracle.mds.exception.MDSExceptionList:
MDS-01329: unable to load element "persistence-config"
MDS-01370: MetadataStore configuration for metadata-store-usage "MAR_TargetRepos" is invalid.
MDS-00929: unable to look up name "jdbc/mds/xxx" in JNDI context While trying to lookup 'jdbc.mds.xxx' didn't find subcontext 'mds'. Resolved 'jdbc'  

Looking in the adf/META-INF/adf-config.xml file I noticed that the MDS configuration referred to a data source that didn't exist but the deployment instructions didn't include the information. Because this EAR file/application was deployed to a development environment I simply converted the MDS configuration to become file-based, as follows:

 <mds:persistence-config>  
 <mds:metadata-store-usages>  
 <mds:metadata-store-usage id="MAR_TargetRepos" deploy-target="true" default-cust-store="true">  
 <mds:metadata-store class-name="oracle.mds.persistence.stores.file.FileMetadataStore">  
 <mds:property name="partition-name" value="xxx01"/>  
 <mds:property name="metadata-path" value="/tmp"/>  
 </mds:metadata-store>  
 </mds:metadata-store-usage>  
 </mds:metadata-store-usages>  
 </mds:persistence-config>  

Instead, you could of course create the missing JDBC data source and point it to the correct MDS schema - especially if this is for a production environment and/or if you're using clustering and want to present the same customizations across the cluster.