How to exclude a maven dependency if in the parent project exists a newer version of it

Question

I am working with a Maven project where I have spring framework dependency version 3.2.3.RELEASE and I have to import this project into many others but in some of them I am using spring 4.

How can I exclude this dependency (spring 3) only in case that the project that uses mine has the same or newer version of spring and in those who hasn't use mine?

Answer 1

One thing you can do is to manually exclude unwanted dependencies:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.your.project</groupId>
        <artifactId>project-name</artifactId>
        <version>1.0.0</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <artifactId>org.springframework</artifactId>
                <groupId>spring-core</groupId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>

But that can get quite verbose.

It may help if you elaborate a bit more on the problem description as it is not clear to me what exactly are you trying to solve or achieve.

For instance if you include a dependency A which has a dependency B in version 1.0 and then you include B in your pom in 1.1 Maven will use only 1.1. I recommend reading up on it a bit here: https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#Transitive_Dependencies