Salient Soft

At the time of writing, the latest plugin version is 3.6.2. The zip of this version does not contain the installation instructions which were present in version 3.6.1, explaining how to download to a local repository and install from that within Eclipse.

The instructions may be found in ReadMe.pdf here.

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I had this issue when deleting and refetching a project from CVS into Eclipse.

It reported that it was unable to resolve a number of the persistence classes such as EntityManager and EntityManagerFactory, even though the libraries and the imports were all present correctly.

This was solved by removing the Java persistence facet from the project facets page, applying the change, and adding persistence back and reconfiguring it. The problem then disappeared.

This was one of several Eclipse ‘gotchas’ I have found where Eclipse reports errors which do not exist. Often, a reconfigure such as the above, or a restart/reload will sort it.

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Sometimes eclipse lists the following error in the problem view :-

Class xxx is listed in the persistence.xml file but is not mapped

This appears to be a synchronisation problem within Eclipse, as deleting the classes from persistence.xml and then adding them back by browsing with Eclipse’s own persistence.xml editor eliminates the problem, even though the resulting file is identical. Validating the original file did not solve the problem.

Even with the error listed, projects still run and build successfully, so the problem is not serious.

I have also had other cases where Eclipse has whinged about a perfectly good persistence.xml, and have in general just lived with it as it is not serious.

This is an important issue to be aware of though to prevent much head scratching when such a problem is believed to be a real error and is not!

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This appears to be an issue if you start Glassfish (2.1.1) outside of Eclipse (3.5.1) – Eclipse does not then always sync with it properly. It may try to start it when it is already started and fail, then fail to publish/run projects correctly.
There is an old bug logged on this here. It claims to have been resolved, but the resolution does not appear to be seamless – it appears that Eclipse cannot fully integrate with an externally started Glassfish.

I expect this to be sorted with Glassfish V3 as this is fully OSGI compliant.
In the meantime, the answer seems to be to allow Eclipse to fully control Glassfish, i.e. start and stop it itself, and to not start Glassfish externally when using Eclipse.

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This error was caused by importing Eclipse projects from another configuration. The projects had a different JRE library configured, which eclipse listed as “Unbound” as it was not present.

Simply adding the default JRE system library and removing the unbound definition solved the problem. To do this, right click the project, and select Build Path/Configure Build Path. Select the libraries tab on the right hand pane and add/remove from there.

Strangely, this problem did not stop projects running completely – eclipse still allowed a number of small test projects to run even with the “unbound” jre configured. The problem only appeared to manifest itself when trying to create the database schema from the entities via right clicking on the project and selecting JPA Tools/Generate Tables from Entities, wherupon the error occurred.

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A little counter intuitive gotcha this one. At first glance, you would expect to right click a server in the servers view, and pick properties. However, if you do this, you do not get the full set – you just get the ability to switch deployed file location and some monitoring options.

If you just double click the server in the list, or right click and select Open, you get the Overview page listing (almost – see below) all the available properties for the server. For some reason in the past I tripped over this more than once, as it just does not seem right that the properties context menu option does not give the full property page (or at least link to it)!

Also, note that the ‘monitoring’ options available on the properties context menu option do not also appear on the Overview page – however the location  options do appear on the overview page in more comprehensive form.

DOH!!!

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If you want to configure the libraries for use with a particular Eclipse plugin, this can seem rather a mystery at first. The traditional way in Eclipse to configure libraries for a project is to open the project properties for a project, select Java Build Path in the list on the left, and visit the libraries tab in the pane on the right. You can then use the “Add Jars” or “Add External Jars” to add jars to the project. To improve project portability across different development platforms, you can also add Classpath Variables which can be defined appropriately for each platform to isolate a project from platform specific jar locations etc. An example of this screen, with the JSF and ICEfaces entries expanded, is here :-

However, whilst you will see entries for plugins such as Eclipslink and ICEfaces on this screen, it does not provide any means of configuring them. Libraries for such plugins use an Eclipse feature called a Classpath Container. This allows the library configuration to be completely dynamic, as it is handled in code via a class. This allows the configuration to change at any time in response to project changes, as every reference to the classpath container is handled via the code rather than being static. To configure plugin libraries, therefore, you need to visit the dialogs for the Project Facets, which is where plugins are configured for the project. This post here, which details how to create a JPA-enabled EJB, shows this in action for JPA.

Another example would be to configure the  libraries for JSF and ICEfaces. You can do this as follows :-

Open the Project Properties dialog for the project, and select the Java Server Faces option under Project Facets in the left hand pane. This lists all the JSF and ICEfaces libraries available which may be selected/deselected.

The buttons on the right of the libraries frame allow management and downloading of the libraries. Clicking the Manage Libraries button allows configuration of the libraries available for selection in the project facets dialog above.

This is for example where you would upgrade ICEfaces libraries to a new version. You can leave both versions, or remove the old ones once you don’t need them any more. You can then select the new versions for that particular project in the parent Project Facets dialog.

Note that one particular issue arises when creating a new Eclipse workspace, as it is useful to migrate all the library definitions to the new workspace to avoid having to set them up manually or download them again. This post describes how you can do this by exporting and importing workspaces preferences. The post also discusses the issue of library location when sharing libraries – this is important as by default you would end up with one workspace sharing libraries within the folder structure of another workspace. My typical development folder structure is detailed at the end of this post.

If you subsequently return to view the libraries on the Libraries tab of the Java Build Path screen, you will then see the results of your efforts – the libraries for the plugins will have changed in accordance with your actions.

The dialogs used for plugin configuration do vary and are certainly not always intuitive or consistent – in these examples JPA was configured via the Java Persistence dialog in the project properties or via a link on the JPA facet screen which is not always present. In contrast, the JSF libraries (including the ICEfaces libraries) are configured via the Java Server Faces option under Project Facets. Even though there is an ICEfaces option under project facets, in my 3.5 Galileo Eclipse this displays “unknown library configuration”. However, the configuration is all there if you are willing to hunt around a bit for it!

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This simple example was performed with Eclipse Galileo 3.5.1

1/ Project Creation Dialog

From the menus in eclipse, select File/New/EJB project. On the resulting dialog, name the project. You can pick other options at this stage such as EAR membership but this can be done later if desired. Note that we are not amending the configuration section (via the modify button) at this stage to add JPA faceting (more on this later).

Click Finish and your EJB project will be created.

2/Project Facets

Right click your new project, and select Project Facets on the left. Tick the box marked Java Persistence in the middle pane, and you will be presented with the following screen :-

3/ JPA Facets

Now Click the “Further configuration available” link at the bottom. This will display the JPA Facet dialog as follows. On this screen you should do the following :-

1. Select the correct platform version and library type – typically these will be Eclipselink 1.1 or later version if available.
2. Untick the box marked “Include libraries with this application”.  The  latest Eclipselink.jar  library should be deployed separately to Glassfish, and stored in the $GLASSFISH_HOME/lib directory. To clarify, Eclipselink is available as a single jar, non-OSGI deployment, or split up into multiple jars for OSGI deployment. The OSGI jars have the long names with the OSGI packaging prefixes such as “org.eclipse.persistence.core” followed by name and version number information. They are a finer grained breakdown of the classes to allow more selectivity/flexibility in use. You can copy the OSGI jars to $GLASSFISH_HOME/lib directory – this will also work but is unnecessarily complex for non-OSGI use. This post here contains a brief overview of OSGI and links to detailed information about it.
3. Select the database connection to be used. If it is not already present, click the Add connection link to create a new one. This also allows you to add a new JDBC provider for a given database type, and point to the jar file(s) for the provider. Note that you will also need to add the JDBC provider jar to GLASSFISH_HOME/lib. To clarify, this database connection is used by eclipse to validate the persistent entities and mappings in the project during development. It is not used by Glassfish at run time. The run time connection (data source) will be created in Glassfish, and persistence.xml will be configured to use the datasource that you created in Glassfish.
4. Next, you can select whether your annotated persistent classes will be discovered automatically, or whether they must be listed explicitly in persistence.xml. To ensure portatbility, you should take the manual option as  automatic discovery is not guarrranteed to be portable.
5. Finally you can select whether or not to create orm.xml. You can always create it later if you need it – if you are using annotations entirely you won’t. This post here describes how you can combine both annotations and orm.xml in order to both take advantage of features like sequences in Oracle whilst still retaining database independance.

Click OK on the JPA Facet dialog, and then OK on the project facets screen. This will complete the creation of your project.

Note that as already stated, it is possible to click the modify button in the configuration section of the dialog in stage 1, which will also display the project facet screen. However, this version of the project facet screen is different to the one displayed if you select Project Facets after creating the project. In particular it does not have the “Further configuration available” option, and so does not allow you to display the JPA Facet dialog to modfy the options there. It assumes defaults for these options instead.

It is possible to  reconfigure the project JPA Facet settings subsequently, by selecting the “Java Persistence” option which appears in the list on the left of the project properties dialog (this only appears for projects with the JPA facet selected). This displays the “Java Persistence” dialog which has the same options as the “JPA Facets” dialog. Instead, you can also untick Java Persistence on the Project Facets screen, applying the changes, and retick the option. This will reveal the “Further Configuration Available” option to allow access to the JPA Facet dialog as well. In the example above, we added the Java persistence facet after saving the project which gave us immediate access to the JPA Facets dialog.

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A useful article on this, and on keeping Eclipse clean is here. Some general points on this are as follows :-

1. In my experience it does not pay to let workspaces become too large, as metadata corruption can sometimes cause the whole workspace to fail to load and cross project pollution of metadata can happen. It also helps with performance not to have a huge workspace. I keep all related projects for a given application in the same workspace, but not others.
2. The article describes the use of the -clean command line argument to remove cached OSGi framework and Eclipse run time metadata. I haven’t used it myself, but it is said to be able to fix really obscure bugs/issues caused by metadata corruption.
3. When creating a new workspace, use File/Export/Preferences to save a preferences file which can be imported into the new workspace. This will allow e.g. your plug in libraries and other preferences to be quickly defined in the new workspace. If you do not do this, you need to either download the libraries again via eclipse’s user library management, or load them one at a time. An xml file is used to define the userlibraries and I did not look into how to store a library repository locally with its own xml definition.
4. Note that when sharing the libraries across multiple workspaces, you will want to change the default download locatation when downloading them initially – the default is <workspace>\libraries, which would mean that subsequent workspaces would be sharing libraries from inside another one.  This post here details my typical folder structure which places the shared libraries at a level above the workspaces. You will need to modify the download path each time you download a library (in my case this involves just taking out the Workspaces\<workspace>\ levels from the path).

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Sometimes Eclipse fails to start correctly, refusing to open various views. The following error is typical :-

“Eclipse Galileo Could not open the editor: The editor class could not be instantiated.
This usually indicates a missing no-arg constructor or that the editor’s class name was mistyped in plugin.xml.”

There can be a number of causes, but this suggestion may fix it (worked for me) :-http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&goto=443229&S=c7e035ee876b3f197920eb538fdca5c6#msg_443229

The fix is to delete the following file :-
.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core/variablesAndContainers.dat 

The problem is said to be related to a bug in the data tools plugin. It should be be fixed in version 1.7.2 of the plugin.

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