I have a similar problem.
We needed of a datasource defined in standalone.xml
We did not want the username/password to the production database stored in standalone.xml, and our first try was to pass it in as a system property. It worked, but then the username/password was logged to our boot.log.
Our next try was to add the username/password to a property file.
We addeda "-Pdatasource.properties" to the call of standalone.sh
It worked, and username/password was not logget to our boot.log anymore.
But now we got a new problem!!
For some reason JBoss7 writes the standalone.xml back to disk, and resolves the properties stored in datasource.properties to standalone.xml.
datasource.properties
datasource.username=myuser
datasource.password=mypassword
standalone.xml
<user-name>${datasource.username}</user-name>
<password>${datasource.password}</password>
was after booting up JBoss7 saved back to the standalone.xml as
<user-name>myuser</user-name>
<password>mypassword</password>
It seems to me as a bug i Jboss7.
Any idea anyone?
We even tried to write protect standalone.xml and got the following result:
"Failed to store configuration to standalone.xml: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /opt/jboss-7.0.2/standalone/configuration/standalone.xml (Permission denied)"