Eclipse project configuration using m2e

Question

We use maven / m2e / eclipse harvesters for our work. We start by importing the master maven pom file into eclipse, and our projects are imported. Our source code management system is configured to ignore project files created with eclipse, because we do not want to check anything generated. All this works well, not problems for this purpose.

What we would like to do is set up some common eclipse preferences for all projects, to provide a standard coding style for all developers and to follow the best Java practices. Example: reorganizing import parameters in eclipse, formatting the code when saving the file, and the standard line width (we prefer 120 characters over the default 80 eclipse default value)

It seems that m2e can be configured to generate some of these parameters using the project configurator, but cannot find any examples.

Any thoughts on how we can achieve this functionality? It would be much better to have specific project entries created from the maven pom configuration, and everyone would use the same settings automatically.

I don't mind writing code for m2extension, but I'm not familiar with eclipse guts and I don't know what to do.

Answer 1

I'm not sure how to do this through m2e, but you can export your code formatter from Eclipse and instruct new developers to import it when they are configured; I have done just that in the past, and this leads to a consistent coding style (and sometimes to grumpy developers, warn me!).

In Eclipse, go to

Window → Settings → Java → Code Style → Formatting

and create a profile that determines how you like your Java. Then select “Edit” in this profile, and you will see an option in the upper right corner of “Export”, as a result of which an XML file will be created. Check it in your repository somewhere or otherwise distribute it to your developers, and they can import it in the same way. Then each time they press ctrl + shift + f, they will all be formatted the same way.

More help here: Eclipse Indigo Java Formformatter