Is there any way to reorder projects in the package/project explorer in Eclipse?

Question

I'm working on source code that is split across several projects with a specifically defined build order. I want to see the projects sorted by the build order so I can always tell which classes can be used in which projects. Does anyone know how to do this in Eclipse Kepler?

Answer 1

If you are not already using working sets in Eclipse, they provide a good way to organize your projects. The organization is single-level, rather than hierarchical, but you can group projects and then quicly select in the project explorer view settings whether you want the working sets to be shown or not. A potentially useful detail is that a project may be contained in multiple working sets, so that you can have multiple grouping criteria at the same time.

In your case, you could define a working set for each phase of your build, prefixing its name with a letter or number that would ensure its presentation in a specific order. Or you could define a working set for each set of projects with the same dependencies.

Alternatively, you might be able to just rename your projects appropriately. In many cases the project name itself is mostly cosmetic, although it is often used as a default in generated files.

In my opinion, however, the easiest way to "tell which classes can be used" is to just configure your project build paths correctly and let the editor do the rest. For me it is more natural not to use a class because it is not proposed for auto-completion or because any such use results in a compiler error, rather than explicitly checking the dependencies each and every time...

Answer 2

IMHO there is no such feature in eclipse. But you can use Resource Tagger plugin or Resource decorator plugin and filter the resources based on different conditions.