Escape String issue for a Spring Boot Application vmargs in Visual Studio Code

Question

I am trying to run Spring Boot Application in a Visual Studio Code with the RedHat Java extension. I am adding JVM args as shown below in the launch.json.

{
  "configurations": [
    {
      "type": "java",
      "name": "Application",
      "request": "launch",
      "mainClass": "com.Application",
      "projectName": "Application",
      "vmArgs": [
        "-Dserver.port=8081",
        "-DPROJECT_NAME=AAA",
        "-DAPP_NAME=AAA",
        "-DUSER_ROLE="
      ]
    }
  ]
}

One of the argumnet is USER_ROLE that needs to be a json string. Example, USER_ROLE: {"USER":{"ROLE":"DEVELOPER"}}

I am facing problem while putting this value in the list of vmargs in launch.json.

I have tried different approaches.

Example1,   "-DUSER_ROLE={\"USER\":{\"ROLE\":\"DEVELOPER\"}}"
Example2,   "-DUSER_ROLE={\\\"USER\\\":{\\\"ROLE\\\":\\\"DEVELOPER\\\"}}"

After running the App, this are the values getting passed to the variable.

Example1, {\USER\\:{\ROLE\\:[\DEVELOPER\\}}
Example2, {\\\USER\\\\\\:{\\\ROLE\\\\\\:[\\\DEVELOPER\\\\\\}}

Quotations are getting ignored. Please help me out with this. I am able to use other IDEs but wanted to try VS Code. I also wanted to know if this is a best practice to add vmargs. Please let me know if there's better way.

Answer 1

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "type": "java",
            "name": "Current File",
            "request": "launch",
            "mainClass": "${file}"
        },
        {
            "type": "java",
            "name": "BuilderApplication",
            "request": "launch",
            "mainClass": "com.BuilderApplication",
            "projectName": "builder",
            "env": {
               "FIRST_ARG": "{\"user\":{\"role\":[\"developer\"]}}"
            },
            "vmArgs": [
                "-D2nd_ARG=",
            ]
        }
    ]
}

I was able to configure the launch.json as shown above to fix the issue I had. I had to make use of vmArgs as well in this because env was not supporting empty argument.

Although I switched to STS (easy and simple), this workaround is usable if you want to use VSC.