I have a large application with many eclipse (actually using Spring Source Toolsuite) projects with ivy managed dependencies for each project. We currently have it setup and working where you can have project A (a dynamic web project that generates a war) and project B (generates a jar) setup such that project A depends on project B and if you only have project A in your workspace, it will go pull the jar file generated by project B from the ivy repository. We setup the deployment assembly to take the eclipse library generated from the ivy resolve and put it in the WEB-INF/lib directory so we can easily deploy to tomcat.
With the manual process, all of this works. I can make a change to project B, publish it to my local ivy repository, and re-resolve the dependencies on project A, and I get the new project B jar file and everything compiles and updates on tomcat as expected.
The problem I’m having comes when I change the ivy resolve settings of project A to “Resolve dependencies in workspace”. When I make changes in project B, project A successfully notices the change and compiles correctly, but the deployment assembly breaks. When I go look in tomcat, it has a folder for project A’s context root, but it is empty. If I uncheck the “Resolve dependencies in workspace” checkbox, the context root folder gets populated and everything returns to a working state.
I can continue doing the manual process, but it is a huge timesavings if I can get ivy to use my workspace first, then get the jar from the repository if the project does not exist in my workspace. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
The solution was to add the Utility Module facet to project B (Project Properties->Project Facets->Utility Module) so that eclipse would know the structure of the jar file that is supposed to be generated.