Maven/Eclipse 插件：让新 Maven 项目依赖于旧的非 Maven 项目的最简单方法？

Question

I created a new Maven project in Eclipse. This was working fine until I needed to add a dependency to another Eclipse project, a legacy utility project, which does not have a pom.xml, and does not have the directory structure of a typical Maven project. (It has the directory structure of a typical eclipse Java project). This other project is in the same Eclipse workspace as the Maven project.

In looking at other posts on this, it seems that usually the solution is to build the jar for the other project and install it in Maven. However I am actively modifying code in the utility project while writing code in the Maven project, so I can't just install a jar once to satisfy the dependency.

What is the easiest way to handle this so that I can code simultaneously in both projects, and also get maven to build cleanly? (Of course Eclipse can build just fine with just a project dependency.)

UPDATE

Using the Build Helper plugin to add the utility projects source folder to my pom was a viable path to the solution, but then I needed to update all the dependencies of the utility project into my new Mavne project, which started to make the whole process too time consuming (and also not really the chain of dependencies I wanted). I think that if I would have added all the dependencies, then Build Helper suggestion would have worked.

For now, I built the utility project jar and installed it into maven. Which turned out to be the the quickest solution. I will try to Mavenize the utility project, without modifying its structure (as suggested by FrVaBe below), and see if I can link the poms afterward.

I am going to keep this question open until I have a full solution which can be reported back, since I assume this is a problem others will have (trying to integrate legacy projects with new maven projects).

Answer 1

For the development time you can add the dependency as a System Dependency . It will be resolved by the file path (which can be the path to your utility.jar file under development) in this case.

It is added as describe in the link above, eg:

  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>my-utility</groupId>
      <artifactId>my-utility</artifactId>
      <version>1.0</version>
      <scope>system</scope>
      <systemPath>${somewhere}/lib/my-utility.jar</systemPath>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>

The maven handling of System dependencies is sometimes special. Eg they will not be included in war-packages! Therefore, when you are finished I would strongly recommend to install your utility library to the maven respository or to deploy it to a repository manager (Nexus/Artifactory).

Answer 2

You can add utility project's src folder to your working project in eclipse. For your development purpose.

right click on Working project
go to properties and choose java build path
go to source tab
Add your utility project src folder to that.

Later you can install your jar as maven dependency.

Answer 3

i think this http://www.avajava.com/tutorials/lessons/how-do-i-add-a-project-as-a-dependency-of-another-project.html?page=1 link should help. Its's a step by step tutorial.