WildFly environment variable parsing a JDBC string with semicolon - sql-server

Question

I am having a heck of a time using an environment variable with a semicolon in a properties file read by WildFly (24) in Linux. One like:
DATABASE_JDBC_URL=jdbc:sqlserver://sqlserver.c3klg5a2ws.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:1433;DatabaseName=ejbca;encrypt=false
The issue is that its truncating things at the semicolon if I don't use quotes so I end up with it trying to write to master since it thinks no database is specified.
I have it setup so that variable is in a file called datasource.properties that gets read from standalone.conf where this variable sits:
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -DDATABASE_JDBC_URL=${DATABASE_JDBC_URL}"
It's read in with the following in standalone.conf:
set -a
. /opt/wildfly_config/datasource.properties
set +a
That in turn gets populated in standalone.xml with:
<connection-url>${env.DATABASE_JDBC_URL}</connection-url>
I try putting it in quotes and oddly enough it doesn’t start at all. Standalone.sh is no longer able to parse it:
/opt/wildfly/bin/standalone.sh: line 338: --add-exports=java.desktop/sun.awt=ALL-UNNAMED: No such file or directory
So I then escape it in quotes like this:
DATABASE_JDBC_URL="jdbc:sqlserver://sqlserver.c3klg5a2ws.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:1433\;DatabaseName=ejbca\;encrypt=false"
Startup looks good in the log output this way:
-DDATABASE_JDBC_URL=jdbc:sqlserver://sqlserver.c3klg5a2ws.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:1433;DatabaseName=ejbca;encrypt=false
But then java doesn’t like it, for some reason it sees the escape ticks:
Caused by: com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerException: The port number 1433\ is not valid.
I can use sed to change the value in the standalone.xml, but all of the other properties I am doing work fine with the exception of this one and:
<check-valid-connection-sql>${env.DATABASE_CONNECTION_CHECK}</check-valid-connection-sql>
Where that value is "SELECT 1;" which it also does not like. That one worked with "'SELECT 1;'" but this one does not. I tried single quotes as well. That also gives the parsing error above. Is there any way to read in this environment variable that keeps wildfly happy?

Answer 1

You can enclose the characters you want to escape in { and } braces.
From the SQL Server documentation:
For example, {;} escapes a semicolon.
Just to note: Different database vendors will most likely have different ways of escaping characters in their connection URLs. The above approach works for SQL Server. But just to give one different example, MySQL uses URL encoding.

Answer 2

A alternate solution was to change how the variables were created. Part of the problem I had was that sourcing them from a properties file made them properties and not variables. I ended up creating a /opt/wildfly/bin/start.sh script with:
#!/bin/bash
export DATABASE_JDBC_URL="jdbc:sqlserver://sqlserver.c3klg5a2ws.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:1433;DatabaseName=ejbca;encrypt=false"
/opt/wildfly/bin/standalone.sh
I then changed the wildfly service point to that new start.sh script. No longer have any parsing issues as long as the variables are started in memory.
No escaping was needed after that.