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

Question

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 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.

Answer 1

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