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To develop on Daffodil using Eclipse, you will need Eclipse with the Scala IDE add-ins. Versions from 4.5 (Mars) seem to work acceptablyThe ScalaIDE add-ins are not being maintained however (as of 2021-02-01), and latest version of them is from 2018. However, the ScalaIDE does still work quite well with Daffodil.

• Downloading the entire ScalaIDE 4.7 (pre-built) works reliably.
• Loading the ScalaIDE from the update site has been unreliable at creating a real working environment.
  • Specifically: Eclipse 20-12 does not  work with the ScalaIDE update site for ScalaIDE 4.7.

You will need the Java SDK (not just the JRE), and Daffodil requires Java 8 (aka 1.8) at least.

The daffodil tree includes a sub-directory called eclipse-projects. These can all be imported to Daffodil

An Eclipse 'Linked Resource' named DAFFODIL_ROOT must be defined to be the path to the clone of the git repository for Daffodil.

ScalaIDE 4.7 also requires Java 8 (not newer), so Java 8 JDK is a hard requirement.

• If you are also using other JVM versions or want the default Java to be a newer one, then you can setup the eclipse.ini for ScalaIDE to specifically always use the Java 8 installation.
  • See this page: https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse.ini

Setup Eclipse Projects

For Daffodil 3.0.0 and older:

1. Enable the sbt ecilpse plugin by create the file ~/.sbt/1.0/plugins/plugins.sbt  with the following content

   Code Block
   language scala title plugins.sbt
   addSbtPlugin("com.typesafe.sbteclipse" % "sbteclipse-plugin" % "5.2.4")

   
   

2. Set the DAFFODIL_HOME environment variable to the directory where you have Daffodil checked out. You can run the following, or put it in configureation file like ~/.bashrc
   

   Code Block
   export DAFFODIL_HOME="/path/to/daffodil.git"

   
   

3. Run the following sbt command to generate eclipse project files:
   

   Code Block
   sbt updateClassifiers compile eclipse updateEclipseClasspaths

   
   

For Daffodil 3.1.0 and newer:

1. Run the following sbt command to generate eclipse project files:

   Code Block
   sbt updateClassifiers compile eclipse

   
   

For all Daffodil versions:

The above will create an Eclipse .project, .classpath and .settings within each sub-project.

Then in Eclipse...

1. First turn off automatic build
   1. Project menu at top, ensure "Build Automatically" is unchecked.
2. Import all the daffodil projects
   1. File -> Import, Projects from Git, Existing local repository,
   2. select the daffodil directory -> next -> Import existing Eclipse projects -> Next.
   3. All projects should be pre-selected for you. -> Next.
   4. You should now have a collection of project folders displayed in the package explorer.
3. Fix daffodil-lib (This may be unnecessary. Check it, but 'sbt eclipse' seems to set this up properly.)
   
   1. resource_managed/main folder: right-click Build-Path → add as source folder.
   2. src_managed/main folder also add as source folder
4. Fix daffodil-japi: Edit daffodil-japi/.settings/org.scala-ide.sdt.core.prefs
   1. Delete the line that begins with "XPlugin="
   2. Delete the line that begins with "P="
5. Select and refresh all projects.

You can now build all projects, and run tests in the ordinary Eclipse way.

These projects are all set up to use a common lib_managed project directory that is an Eclipse link to the DAFFODIL_ROOT/lib_managed which is populated using sbt. See the note below about "pre-build with sbt".

Line Endings

Setup Eclipse for "Unix" style line endings - single LF characters, not MS-DOS style CRLF endings.

Pre-build with sbt to Retrieve Libraries

Before starting Eclipse, you must issue the 'sbt updateClassifiers compile' command. This pulls down all libraries needed, and puts them into lib_managed where the eclipse projects are setup to find them. This also pulls down all the source and javadoc jars for convenient access. The compile command forces some code-generator steps to run which create source code in the daffodil-lib module.

Build Macro Lib First

Before building the rest of the Daffodil modules, you must first build daffodil-macro-lib. This defines macros that are used in the other modulesThis 'sbt updateClassifiers compile' must be repeated any time the daffodil-propgen module is changed.

Eclipse Settings for DFDL Schema Authoring/Editing

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1. Window > Preferences > Validation
   
   1. turn off XML Schema Validator
   2. turn off DTD Validator and HTML Validator
   3. click the ... settings box to the right of XML Validator. 
      1. Select Include Group
      2. Click Add Rule
      3. Select File Extension
      4. Click Next
      5. Add extensions tdml
      6. Click Finish
      7. Repeat steps i-vi, replacing tdml with dfdl.xsd
2. Window > Preferences > General > Content Types
   1. Select Text > XML
   2. Click Add...
   3. Set Content type to *.dfdl.xsd
   4. Repeat steps b-c with content type set to *.tdml
3. Window > Preferences > XML > XML Files > Editor
   
   1. Uncheck Format comments
4. Turn off HTML validation.
5. File > Import > XML > XML Catalog
   1. Choose daffodil-lib/src/main/resources/eclipse-xml-catalog.xml
   (optional) Suspend all validators - you may prefer this. Otherwise some errors will always show up in the Daffodil tree due to (DAFFODIL-1638)

Graphics Problems on Linux/Fedora

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