IDempiere/Setting up Eclipse

There are two excellent resources explaining graphically what is required to setup Eclipse:

• From Heng Sin Low (the originator of OSGi Adempiere movement): http://kenai.com/projects/hengsin/pages/Building
• From Dominik Zajac: http://www.banym.de/eclipse/build-the-idempiere-project-using-eclipse-with-buckminster

I'll try to explain here also step by step what is required to let eclipse compile and run iDempiere:

Initial steps

To avoid eclipse complaining about some empty directories not found on the mercurial repository is recommended to create before these two folders:

cd $IDEMPIERE_REPOSITORY
mkdir targetPlatform
mkdir org.adempiere.ui.zk/WEB-INF/classes

Replace $IDEMPIERE_REPOSITORY with the clone folder where you want to work (be the clone of bitbucket, or the experimental mentioned in the Download page

Configuring Target Platform

• Open the eclipse you configured following the instructions from Prerequisites page
• Navigate to File > Switch Workspace > Other
• On the dialog open fill the workspace with the folder where you cloned the code, named above as $IDEMPIERE_REPOSITORY, i.e. /home/carlos/sources/myexperiment)
• After the eclipse open again navigate to Window > Preferences > Plug-in Development > Target Platform
• Push the "Add" button
• Select "Nothing: Start with an empty target definition" and click Next
• Fill the Name with: Adempiere Target Platform
• Push the "Add" button
• Select "Directory" and click Next
• Fill Location with "${workspace_loc}/targetPlatform"
• "Finish" button
• Make the just created platform "Adempiere Target Platform" active and push the "OK" button

Materializing iDempiere project within Eclipse

Now is time to materialize the project, you must be connected to the internet for this stage:

• Navigate to File > Import > Buckminster > Materialize from Buckminster MSPEC, CQUERY or BOM
• Push the "Next" button
• Fill the "Enter a URL ..." box with this folder $IDEMPIERE_REPOSITORY/org.adempiere.sdk-feature/adempiere.cquery
  • You MUST replace the $IDEMPIERE_REPOSITORY with the corresponding folder name
  • Or even better you can use the "Browse" button to navigate there and select the adempiere.cquery file
• Here eclipse takes some time to review dependencies and after that you can push the "Finish" button

Now is a good time to make a coffee (better Colombian coffee) - Eclipse will download and configure the whole project and this can be time consuming.

When this step finishes is recommended to close eclipse and take a backup of the $IDEMPIERE_REPOSITORY folder, in case something mess later you can restore the backup and you won't need to download again the whole thing from internet.