Gradle dependency autocompletion in IntelliJ IDEA - gradle

I've been searching around for a while and can't seem to find anything regarding this issue. I'm new to Java in general and for the last half a year I've been learning Maven. I use IntelliJ IDEA and I'm already used to the fact that it can autocomplete dependency coordinates (groupId, artifactId, version) if you sync the repository. It works nicely and it feels natural when you decide to add some dependency after the initial project generation.
Now I'm trying to switch to Gradle (which is a requirement on my new job) and I'm studying it. And I can't get over the first roadblock that I've encountered with it: there is no autocompletion and it even seems like IntelliJ IDEA's support for this kind of feature has degraded over time (I saw a video of old version of IDEA where there used to be a "Generate" -> "Add maven dependency" option, which I cannot find in the latest version). I even tried a bunch of plugins with names like "Gradle Dependency Helper" and non of them worked.
Are we supposed to type the whole dependency coordinates to add them to gradle build? Because that feels like a big downside of Gradle with IDEA. Or is there some well hidden feature that I missed?

You may manage Gradle dependencies in Intellij IDEA using View→Tool windows→Dependencies.
It allows to add or remove dependencies from dependencies section in your build.gradle and gives full-text search for available dependencies.

Related

Why refresh of Maven repository is not enough for IntelliJ?

I had a NoClassDefFoundError problem with some test, launched from IntelliJ. In order to repair the situation, I had to make several changes in many poms of the project - adding new packages and excluding some old ones for to escape the overlapping of them. Also, I reapired the situation with different versions. But the situation did not improve. Again, some package, declared in pom, was not found where it should be.
I refreshed the maven repository by
mvn -e clean install -U
, as is advised in https://stackoverflow.com/a/9697970/715269 - so old and upvoted answer, that it surely looks as Santa.
The problem remained unchanged.
I output the maven map. It was correct and it contained all needed.
I looked at the list of the External Libraries of the project. It was the old uncorrected list of overlapping jars with same names and different versions, and without good packages I added just now, and well seen in maven tree output!
Already hapless,
I reimported packages in IntelliJ
by:
Ctrl+Shift+A, Reimport All Maven Projects.
Ho! The list of libraries got repaired. And the problem, mentioned in subj, disappeared.
The question is: How it could happen, that the same project has that very pom for everything, but gets packages differently being launched in maven and in IntelliJ?
I know about that feature "delegate IDE build to Maven". And I keep it turned off. But I am NOT talking about the different SW for building. Whether they are different or not, they should be up to the actual pom's. And whereas maven, if turned off from the automatic building won't know about changes in poms, IntelliJ KNOWS about them. It could have jars up to pom, or up to maven - it has sense, but it simply has some old rubbish. Was there some deep thought under that construction?
Every time you manually change the pom.xml file, including the dependencies you need to load these changes into IDE. IDE does it on Reload from Maven action. See also Import Maven dependencies.
Intellij doesn't use maven to bulid and run a project except you are delegating build and run action to maven:
Since, IDEA doen't really use maven to run and build, it uses the pom.xml to import the project structure and "tries" to build the project the same way was maven does.
Actually, there are quite a few differences between these to build processes.
Generating sources or filtering resources (don't know if this is still an issue) aren't done during building the project with Intellij IDEA.
In case you are using code generation you have to build the project via maven first and then - when all the resouces are filtered and additional sources are generated - you are able to run, debug aso. the project with Inellij IDEA.
That's an important thing to be aware of and that's the reason why maven and IntelliJ IDEA project structures might get out of sync.
You can enable the "Reload project after changes in build scripts" feature and select the Any changes checkbox to keep your project structure updated:
Why should you disable this feature anyway
If you are working on a build file (gradle or maven is not important) reloading the structure on any change can be very anoying. It's cpu intense, dependcies are fetched aso.
Therefore, I prefer to reload project structure only in case of an external change. This happens when pulling an updated version of the build file for example.

Ant to maven conversion

I need to convert few projects from ant to maven. I know the basics of both, also read a lot of articles on how to. However, is it a good idea to write a pom using eclipse? Or is it better to write it without using eclipse? The M2Eclipse plugin needs maven to be tweaked more, will the changes related to M2Eclipse cause problems when the war is built on jenkins?
Pros of using Eclipse IDE:
The formatting of pom.xml will be taken care, when you add the 'maven-eclipse-codestyle.xml' to the code formatter, as mentioned here. Formatting will be harder when you do it without an IDE.
The auto-completion feature of eclipse will make your coding easier, since it will automatically sense the open tags and close them. You need to close all the open tags manually, if you don`t use an IDE.
You can view the dependency hierarchy of the dependencies added and hence it might be a bit helpful while managing the dependencies.This can be extremely useful ,when you have transitive dependencies (Dependencies within other dependencies). You can find more about transitive dependencies here.
An IDE will warn you of common mistakes that may occur while coding (something like, 'forgetting to close an open tag','placing a tag in an incorrect location'). This will save a whole lot of time. If you don`t use an IDE, you need to correct the mistakes only when you get an exception after executing a maven command.
Eclipse will warn of missing artifacts (when the dependencies are not present in the local repository), which can help you to fix it before executing the maven goal.
Cons of using Eclipse IDE:
m2e plugin will throw 'Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration' errors all over your pom.xml files. These errors won`t affect your build, but may be quite annoying.
I personally have done migration from Ant to Maven2. IMO it is better to write pom.xml on your own so that you wont face any last minute surprises as well as you will get complete overall knowledge on what you are exactly doing with your pom file.
However if you still want to go with m2e, from my experience it did not create any problems at all. Regarding the build - I guess there shouldn't be any issue. You can refer this link if you need more info about m2e and jekins - m2e and jenkins

Gradle context sensitive support in STS/Eclipse

I am trying to evaluate Gradle as next-gen build tool for some of my future projects.
Steps I've done so far:
I have Java 7 installed on my machine.
Installed Gradle 2.0
Installed Spring Tool Suite 3.6.1, went to dashboard and added support for
Gradle and installed also Groovy-Eclipse package.
Now when I start Gradle projects from scratch or I clone some of the projects from github,
I am not able to get context sensitive help, like Ctrl + Space to autocomplete stuff in
build.gradle file.
I was reading a lot of documentation on net about this, and couldn't find proper answer, so if someone can give me some idea is it working?
Previously I was using Maven, and m2-eclipse, so when I type in pom.xml I am able to do Ctrl + Space which prevents me to make typo mistakes.
NOTE: Just please note that I've enabled Gradle DSL support for my Gradle projects.
Thank You
Gradle's build language is much more dynamic, extensible, and powerful than a Maven POM, and hence it's much harder to develop full IDE support for it. Recent versions of the Eclipse Gradle Plugin have limited editing support, and work is underway to take it to the next level. IntelliJ 14 is already further along, but expect to see further improvements there as well.

How to run plugin on maven dependency

I'm setting up a (java) maven project that depends on a library (Jettison, among others) that is in the Maven repo. Jettison, in turn, depends on stax. I need to run a tool (Jar Jar Links) on stax (to change the namespace). How do I alter the rules for a transitive dependency in a maven project? My transitive dependencies are being included in my target folder using the copy-dependencies goal (I assume this is how things are usually done). I assume that this is the point where the plugin would be run on the transitively-generated artifact.
Extra question: I don't need this at this point but how would I go about altering the source in the transitive dependency? I can get the jar of the source with mvn dependency:sources but, from there, I'm not sure what the right approach is.
Victory!
Seems at least two people are even more clueless about Maven than me so let me explain what I'm doing before I report the fix at the bottom of this post (spoiler alert: it looks to be a bug in JarJar).
Android uses Java but its missing a lot of the java core (specifically, javax classes). The Android DEX compiler (which converts .jars to Android .dex files) won't even allow you to compile things in the java.* or javax.* namespace because it'll (usually) break stuff. However, in some (many) cases, there are routines that you might want to include -- specifically because they are used by existing libraries. The most legendary is StAX, which is why Google posted an example of how to include it here in the Dalvik repo's wiki. The example uses JarJar... with ant. Transitive dependencies are not really an issue when you aren't using a repo so they are not addressed in the wiki.
I was able to get JarJar to run on my source with Maven but without changing the namespaces in the dependencies (and transitive dependencies), that's worthless. Hence my question.
I thought that the copy-dependencies plugin might be useful for... copying the dependencies and running a transforming plugin in the process. Copying dependencies is mentioned as a step in the official "Maven in 5 minutes" doc so it seemed like a good start but maybe the the people who wrote the official docs don't know how to use it :-) . Either way, it it didn't help -- there is no simple way I could see to transform the jars as it copies.
Using the verbose spew from Maven, I was able to see that Jar Jar was in fact processing my jars properly... and then throwing out the result. It would have packaged the converted classes from the transitive dependencies in my artifact with the rest of my code but, instead, it "Excluded" them. Jar Jar parameters are basically undocumented and most of the tags aren't even listed in the docs but all of the examples I could find use a section with wild-cards that tell it what classes to hold onto. At least I thought (think?) that's what the section is for. Instead, it seems to randomly throw out stuff. Basically, the section is busted. For example, I had:
<keep>
<pattern>com.example.**</pattern>
</keep>
...thinking that this would keep classes that began with com.example. Wrong. It keeps whatever the hell it wants. I tried a million things in that spot until one worked:
<keep>
<pattern>*.**</pattern>
</keep>
This only keeps the classes I wanted -- the classes it updated and the originals of the ones that it didnt touch. Note that ** doesn't even work. This is version 1.8 of the JarJar plugin (the version most poms Ive found use).
Back to work.

Determining source of a (masked version) maven dependency

I had a situation in my project where two dependencies relied on a different version of a jar. Just showing the dependency tree only showed the newer version and where it was used, so I ended up going through the POM files (I had an idea where it might be) to find the source.
My question: is it possible to get a dependency tree that includes these dependencies that were removed (showing why they were removed). I seem to recall the m2eclipse plugin can do it, but I'd prefer a command line tool (since I'm not using eclipse).
edit:
Specifically, I already tried the dependency tree, including running with full debug output (-X). As far as I could tell, it doesn't show when it's masking these dependencies.
Just try the maven-dependency-plugin use the tree goal to look at the tree of dependencies. But it might be a good idea to use Eclipse via m2e plugin for such problems.

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