I m developing various in-house extensions for JIRA, the issue tracker we use. So far I worked with Netbeans and everything worked like a charm. However, now I need to switch to Eclipse and I m having struggle setting up the environment for this development project.
First a clarification why I m using the approach I m describing here: building JIRA (in an IDE) is not easily done and I m absolutely not interested in wasting my time to figure out how to do it. Besides, I don t need to build it, I just want to develop extensions and be able to use the IDE s auto-completion and help support (API docs). Atlassian (the company that develops JIRA) provides a "development" package, but it s just a sorry excuse rather than a real solution.
What I did with Netbeans was to create a library bundle with all relevant jar-files, the Java source files and the API documentation. This way I could use auto-completion, "jump to" the source and the API docs would pop-up when needed.
It seems Eclipse doesn t offer such a functionality, at least I couldn t figure out how to add the sources and the API docs to a "User Library" (which I d then add as a dependency to my project just as with Netbeans).
My next approach was to create a separate project that holds all the stuff and mark that project as a dependency of my project. This works, but it leaves me with another issue: now I get 37k errors reported (all within the "dependency project"). As said, correctly setting up building for this dependency is a major struggle and not my original goal, therefore I d happily ignore these errors. Automatic building is turned off and changing the "Errors/Warnings" settings under "Java Compiler" for the project didn t change a thing, so I m kind of lost now.
Okay, let me try to phrase this as questions:
Maybe I just didn t find it: Is there a way to create a dependency bundle (call it whatever you want) in Eclipse that -- besides just carrying jar-files -- gives me the ability to use the API docs and "jump to" the declaration in the sources?
If not, what s the common practice to do in such a situation?
If the "dependency project" solution is the way to go, how can I completely disable compiler errors for that project?