Exclude all transitive dependencies of a single dependency

Question

In Maven2, to exclude a single transitive dependency, I have to do something like this:

<dependency>
  <groupId>sample.group</groupId>
  <artifactId>sample-artifactB</artifactId>
  <version>1</version>
   <exclusions>
     <exclusion>
       <groupId>sample.group</groupId>
       <artifactId>sample-artifactAB</artifactId>
     </exclusion>
   </exclusions>
</dependency>

The problem with this approach is that I have to do this for every transitive dependency contributed by sample-artifactB.

Is there a way to use some sort of wildcard to exclude all transitive dependencies at once instead of one-by-one?

Answer 1

What has worked for me (may be a newer feature of Maven) is merely doing wildcards in the exclusion element.

I have a multi-module project that contains an "app" module that is referenced in two WAR-packaged modules. One of those WAR-packaged modules really only needs the domain classes (and I haven't separated them out of the app module yet). I found this to work:

<dependency>
    <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
    <artifactId>app</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>*</groupId>
            <artifactId>*</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

The wildcard on both groupId and artifactId exclude all dependencies that normally would propagate through to the module using this dependency.