Question

I have a project which as part of the build process creates an XMLBeans jar file (stbSchemas.jar) which I want to include and reference in this project.

Is this the best way to go about this (Single project) or should I have a child project which is built from the parent project?

I am building this using Maven2 inside Eclipse. Is there a better way to do this so that I can maintain the integrity of the projects and stability of the builds.

Answer 1

Hmm. If I understand correctly, you’re saying that the you need to reference the stbSchemas.jar in your project in order to build some code that DOESN’T go into the stbSchemas.jar file. If that’s a correct assumption, then I think you should probably do a little bit of refactoring so that you have something like this:

1) a Maven parent pom file at the top level of the project. That parent pom has a modules section that would reference the 2 modules from step 2. E.G:

<modules>
  <module>stbSchemas</module>
  <module>core</module>
</modules>

2) Split the code into clean modules. stbSchemas would be the first, your other code would be a 2nd module. Each of those modules gets its own pom.xml file that would reference the parent pom file like this:

<parent>
       <groupId>parent.group</groupId>
        <artifactId>parent</artifactId>
        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
      </parent>

The second module’s pom.xml file would also need a dependency section for stbSchemas.jar, like this:

<dependency>
  <groupId>my.group</groupId>
  <artifactId>stbSchemas</artifactId>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

Then, when you build your second module, it’ll pick up stbSchemas.jar.

3) Once you’ve got that (or something similar) setup in Maven, you can use the maven eclipse plugin (mvn eclipse:eclipse) to generate a correct eclipse classpath for the whole project. You can then refresh the project in Eclipse, and that will put stbSchemas.jar on the classpath for you.