Compatibility with eclipse-like classpath

[arthurcaccavo]

My company would like to start using vscode for java development but this process needs to have a transition period where the project will be developed on vscode and eclipse at the same time.

I'm trying to setup the project and the first problem I face is that vscode cannot resolve the classpath Referenced Libraries dependency. In our classpath we have lines like <classpathentry kind="lib" path="/Libs/lib/lucene-core.jar"/> that reference the Lib folder on the workspace that has many different projects. But vscode-java interprets this as an absolute path, reading this like C:\Libs\lib\lucene-core.jar instead of <workspace>\Libs\lib\lucene-core.jar and, obviously, don't find the package.

I found on this issues borad that support for eclipse-like classpath is out of scope for this extension so I searched for ways to work this out like this, but I hit a wall that don't seem to have a solution.

I would like to use a settings.json on a .vscode folder so I can tailor the vscode specific configuration as per documentation but the .classpath and .project need to be kept intact to still work on eclipse. However if a .classpath is present on the project folder, even if it's a broken one, vscode-java ignores the settings.json file.

I would like to propose a configuration to override this behavior and set to the project to ignore any .classpath or .project file, as interpreting it as an unmanaged folder, and focus on the provided settings.json so this hybrid setup can be viable.

Thank you in advance!

[rgrunber]

Just to confirm, is your Lib/ folder, that contains dependencies is a separate folder at the same level as other project folders ? If so, I guess the problem is vscode-java tries to hide the workspace location and just use it for storing metadata. Unfortunately that's exactly where you're storing the dependencies. I'd have to play with this approach to see if there's anything we could do to support this. We do support Eclipse projects, and that's probably why if an Eclipse project is detected, the settings under .vscode might be ignored. Eclipse has its own way to define settings (eg .settings/org.eclipse.jdt.core.prefs) so those should probably be used.

I know of requests similar to eclipse-jdtls/eclipse.jdt.ls#565 but I think there should be a way to do this without relying on variables.

[arthurcaccavo]

is a separate folder at the same level as other project folders ?

exactly, as many projects have the same dependencies the structure goes as follows

workspace/
├─ project1/
├─ project2/
├─ project3/
├─ ...
├─ Libs/

and each project classpath can reference them like this: <classpathentry kind="lib" path="/Libs/lib/lucene-core.jar"/> no variables are used, at least on eclipse side. But, as I can't make it stop working on eclipse I would need some kind of configuration so I can make it also work on vscode.

I saw the comment on #183 (comment) and if it's not on the team plan to fully support eclipse it would be nice if the .vscode unmanaged style settings could override any eclipse config entirely, or at least have a configuration option for doing so. This makes sense cause why would anyone do a .vscode config if not to override the current configuration? Or if one day other IDE starts to get traction and have conflicting configuration with vscode? it would also be nice so one can set a vscode specific configuration that supersedes all.

[rgrunber]

I tried this out and it works for me. I just created a project that looks like this :

./Libs/lib/org.apache.lucene.core_10.1.0.v20241221-1000.jar
./project2/src/p2/ProjectTwo.java
./project2/.project
./project2/.classpath
./project2/.settings/org.eclipse.core.resources.prefs
./project2/.settings/org.eclipse.jdt.core.prefs
./project1/src/p1/ProjectOne.java
./project1/.project
./project1/.classpath
./project1/.settings/org.eclipse.core.resources.prefs
./project1/.settings/org.eclipse.jdt.core.prefs

$ cat project1/.classpath 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classpath>
	<classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER/org.eclipse.jdt.internal.debug.ui.launcher.StandardVMType/JavaSE-23">
		<attributes>
			<attribute name="module" value="true"/>
		</attributes>
	</classpathentry>
	<classpathentry kind="src" path="src"/>
	<classpathentry kind="lib" path="/Libs/lib/org.apache.lucene.core_10.1.0.v20241221-1000.jar"/>
	<classpathentry kind="output" path="bin"/>
</classpath>

Even replacing the path with "../Libs/lib/org.apache.lucene.core_10.1.0.v20241221-1000.jar" seems to work. Do you have a sample project you can share that isn't working for you ?