Deploy pre-built resource adapter archive as part of Enterprise Application project

I have a pre-built resource adapter archive (*.rar) file which I need to make part of a Netbeans Enterprise Application project.

In project properties in Build > Packaging I added this *.rar file and set Location In Archive to root (/).

There's also an EJB module project that uses classes from the *.rar. When I build the *.ear file and deploy it manually to Glassfish, all is fine, I don't even have to write application.xml.

However, when I deploy the app project from Netbeans, my EJB can't access the classes within the *.rar and throws a NoClassDefFoundError. If I put the file application.xml into src/conf/, deploy from Netbeans fails with:

IllegalArgumentException: Expected to find an expanded directory for submodule my.rar but found a JAR.  If this is a directory deployment be sure to expand all submodules.

application.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE application PUBLIC
    "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD J2EE Application 1.3//EN"
    "http://java.sun.com/dtd/application_1_3.dtd">
<application>
  <display-name>EnterpriseApplication1</display-name>
  <module>
    <connector>my.rar</connector>
  </module>
  ...
</application>

How to make Netbeans unpack the rar while deploying?

How do you normally develop resource adapters (not pre-built, native projects, not Maven) with Netbeans? I don't see a template for that.

My Netbeans is 8.2 shipped with Glassfish 4.1.1.

I found that the Netbeans build script uses the <nbdeploy> task to cleanup, prepare, and deploy the dist/gfdeploy/Appname directory. This task copies everything from ${build.dir}, so it should be possible to unpack the rars in the pre-run-deploy hook.

After copying, <nbdeploy> unpacks the jar files, but not the rar files. The jars are unpacked into subdirs with the same name, only the .jar suffix is replaced with _jar.

The <nbdeploy> task is called by the -run-deploy-nb target and only when run from Netbeans (when ${netbeans.home} is set).

Knowing that, I added the pre-run-deploy hook in my build.xml:

<target name="pre-run-deploy" if="netbeans.home">
    <fileset dir="${build.dir}" id="nth.archive">
        <include name="my.rar">
    </fileset>
    <pathconvert property="extract.dir" refid="nth.archive">
        <!-- replace last dot with underscore -->
        <mapper type="regexp" from="(.*)[.](.*)" to="\1_\2" />
    </pathconvert>
    <delete dir="${extract.dir}"/>
    <unzip dest="${extract.dir}">
        <resources refid="nth.archive"/>
    </unzip>
    <delete>
        <fileset refid="nth.archive"/>
    </delete>
</target>

Actually, my target is much more complex, because I wanted to expand each file in ${build.dir} matching the *.rar pattern. The full build.xml is here: https://gist.github.com/basinilya/c2c1ad3fc0df2323fc5c5337c19648bb