Eclipse deployment assembly with ivy dependencies fails

Question

I'm using ivy managed dependencies for a dynamic web project in Eclipse 4.3 and everything works. After merging a different branch containing a new module project Eclipse fails to create a war anymore. If I remove IvyDependencies from deployment assembly, a war gets created and deployed again - this archive is missing all dependencies of course.

There are no compile errors, no configuration changes between commits except additonal project / module plus dependency declaration in web project. Comparing eclipse configuration to pre-merge configuration yields nothing.

If validation is enabled following error shows up in eclipse:

CHKJ3008E: Missing or invalid WAR file.

If validation is disabled, publishing fails:

java.lang.NullPointerException at  org.eclipse.wst.common.componentcore.internal.util.VirtualReferenceUtilities.getDefaultProjectArchiveName(VirtualReferenceUtilities.java:81)

Standard eclipse workspace error strategies have been exercised to the max (permutations of clean, re-import projects, remove ivy dependency management, reading, deleting workspace, restarts, server runtime delete/recreate etc.)

Any ideas how to solve this or get to the bottom of this issue?

Answer 1

After resorting to using copying manually retrieved dependencies into WEB-INF/lib a validation error in a dependent project shows up. Fixing this enbaled me to use ivy dependencies in deployment assembly again.... curiously there have been zero changes between commits in that project ...