hapi-fhir-jpaserver-starter | complete starter project you can use to deploy a FHIR

I added this artifact which is a war to my gradle project dependencies. I need to extend some classes, and use a modified servlet contexts from it.

I was expecting the war to be imported as is then I would use gradle tasks to manipulate to include the jars to dependencies, copy static resources to correct classpath etc. But gradle actually added a bunch of jars to dependency.

Im not sure if gradle scanned recursively all paths for jars and poms or probably just the jars under the WEB-INF/classes folder in the war. I can assume probably not the poms repositories as stated here.

Im I correct is assuming the jars in the WEB-INF/lib folder in the deflated war were not imported? its hard to tell as there are a lot of shared dependencies between my project and the war in question

Then whats the best way to declare a dependency on a war in the maven repo/jcenter if I need to extend and modify as I described at the top?

UPDATE:

I am now trying to use answer below and this solution https://discuss.gradle.org/t/how-to-add-an-artifactory-war-as-a-gradle-dependency/19804/2 , This only worked after moving the directory with the copied jars outside the buildDir my build.gradle