Ant properties break as soon as you add custom ant properties to the project… Or did they fix that in Eclipse 3.5?

Submitted by Lennart Kats on 16 February 2010 at 16:08

Plugin-provided ant properties also seem to cause problems with Eclipse 3.2 and/or 3.3.

Nope, they didn’t fix it in Eclipse 3.5. Figures.

What is the issue here?

This is about the properties you can set in Project Properties > Builders > Properties. With those properties, you can set things like machine-specific configuration. In the WebDSL plugin project we needed that kind of configuration as well, in order to point to the local path of the full WebDSL source code. You could set that using the properties dialog, but that is broken in Eclipse: it will break all Spoofax-specific builtin properties as well as any other Eclipse builtin properties. Instead, you can use a build.properties file to set those kinds of additional properties, which is the approach currently used in the WebDSL project.

Thanks for comments. At least in Eclipse 3.8 this is no longer an issue.

I’ve tried setting custom properties in Builders > Properties, they appear in the launch configuration and are then visible in build.main.xml. Of course, for builds outside of Eclipse where build.main.xml expects some properties which are in the launch configuration we may need to figure out some other solution.

In any case, this works inside Eclipse, and even editing the launch configuration in both UI and file directly leads to a sane xml file.