How to deploy generated resources to tomcat with m2e-wtp?

Question

I am pulling JavaScript from a jar as part of my build process. I wish this js to be part of my web resources for the app deployed on tomcat and I have updated my build process to allow this to happen. Doing a maven build (outside eclipse) works as expected and I can package up a war with everything in its proper order.

However, when building with eclipse I have run into some headaches. My understanding was in order to have web resources deployed to tomcat through an incremental build, I needed to put these build-time generated js files into the target/m2e-wtp/web-resources directory. However, when I publish these new files are ignored and the web-resources deployed to tomcat seem to be pulled from my source.

I also adjusted my project's deployment assembly settings. Through this I still don't have it working. I have the entry [source:/target/m2e-wtp/web-resources, DeployPath:/] which should find the newly generated files when I perform a "publish" to the server. However, the same thing happens where m2e-wtp seems to be pulling from source.

Am I missing something? How can I get standard behavior from m2e-wtp (i.e. make it comparable to a build done outside of eclipse)? Or can I have eclipse just build the war and deploy it as such (not do the incremental builds, I can sacrifice some speed)?

FYI (versions):

eclipse: (Using Spring Tool Suite) 3.2.0
m2e: 1.3.1
m2e-wtp: 0.17.0
tomcat: 7.0

Experiment added later:

After deleting my target dir, I performed a publish to Tomcat and all the web-resources were copied from my source. I also got a popup about files not found, most of which are compiled classes. However, it was looking for three files in the /target/m2e-wtp/web-resources/META-INF. Does the m2e-wtp plugin only look for specific files in a folder rather than the entire specified folder?

Answer 1

The problem is that the target directory was not being refreshed. Eclipse (or m2e plugin for that matter) doesn't recognize or care that files change in the target directory during a build, something that I was assuming. For now I have the auto-refresh (for the workspace) option on. The refresh on access option didn't working as it seemed to trigger the refresh only when I was publishing to tomcat for the first time.