Eclipse not synchronized with file system changes made by ant's build.xml

We have a pretty big project. We use ant for setting the environment. One of the things that happens during the ant script is that a jar is copied to the lib folder of a project. Then, we use ant tasks: eclipse.refreshLocal and eclipse.incrementalBuild so that the jar now copied will resolve compilation problems in the project that refer to it.

Unfortunately, the projects seem unsynchronized with the filesystem. Project > properties > build path shows that the jar is present (probably information that is refresh while looking at the propertiesw) but the incrementalBuild didn't do what we expected it to do.

Also, sometimes a project that depends on this jar and we refreshed and built it (through ant) has a single compilation error: "The project cannot be resolved until build path errors are resolved". In other times, the are many compilation errors indicating the project hasn't noticed the new jar.

When I build it through eclipse, it is ok.

I was worried that maybe there are circular dependencies between the projects, but it appears the are no such dependencies (Build properties: the circular dependencies option is set 开发者_JAVA百科to "Error", and the are no errors of this form in the projects).

Anybody is fimiliar with the problem? What is the proper way to deal with this problem?

Thank you for your help.

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If you right click on the build.xml and select Run as → Ant Build... you'll see a tab called Refresh. Just check the option Refresh resources upon completion.

(I use this myself when generating code in an ANT xslt target and it works like a charm.)

You may also want to check Refresh automatically under Window → Preferences → Workspace

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Try Cleaning the entire workspace and refresh :)

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One solution which might work for you is to modify the Eclipse launch config for the Ant build (Run -> External Tools -> External Tools Config), and explicitly configure it to refresh the workspace (or parts of it) when the Ant build finished. This removes the need to perform the refresh from within the Ant script itself, and it always triggers the correct build reaction when the script completes.

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Eclipse does not generally like it very much if you change files in its workspace from outside. There is an option in the Eclipse Preferences to automatically sync with the filesystem, but that can be very intense with regards to IO.

And it will probably still not solve all your problems, esp. when you change library jars.

Even considering skaffman's suggestion with the Refresh on build completion, I am not sure this would really improve your situation, but give it a try.

From my experience, realistically I would have yet to see a solution in a big setup that really works and makes life easier instead of just creating a different set of problems.