How to reference javadocs to dependencies in Maven's eclipse plugin when javadoc not attached to dependency

Question

I use Eclipse, Maven, and Java in my development. I use Maven to download dependencies (jar files and javadoc when available) and Maven's eclipse plug-in to generate the .project and .classpath files for Eclipse. When the dependency downloaded does not have attached javadoc I manually add a link for the javadoc in the .classpath file so that I can see the javadoc for the dependency in Eclipse. Then when I run Maven's eclipse plugin to regenerate the .classpath file it of course wipes out that change.

Is there a way to configure Maven's eclipse plug-in to automatically add classpath attributes for javadoc when running Maven's eclipse plug-in?

I'm only interested in answers where the javadoc and/or sources are not provided for the dependency in the maven repository, which is the case most often for me. Using downloadSources and/or downloadJavadocs properties won't help this problem.

Answer 1

From the Maven Eclipse Plugin FAQ

The following example shows how to do this in the command-line:

mvn eclipse:eclipse -DdownloadSources=true  -DdownloadJavadocs=true  

or in your pom.xml:

<project>   [...]   <build>     [...]     <plugins>       [...]       <plugin>         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>         <artifactId>maven-eclipse-plugin</artifactId>         <configuration>           <downloadSources>true</downloadSources>           <downloadJavadocs>true</downloadJavadocs>         </configuration>       </plugin>       [...]     </plugins>     [...]   </build>   [...] </project>