Eclipse STS run Spring Boot locally with subprojects - spring

Question

I have the following project structure:
root project
|-- controller
|-- core
|-- widgets
|-- widgetA
|-- widgetB
These projects all get built into jars except controller. Then the jars are deployed to a class folder and controller uses context.xml to specify their location.
This all works great during deployment (except Tomcat's 'redeploy' doesn't redeploy, I suspect an issue with classloaders, but an unload/deploy works fine). However, we currently cannot run this locally in STS because the controller needs a bean from the 'widgets' project that the system can't locate.
The project begins fine when I execute the controller project as a Spring Boot App. It loads, and discovers the beans defined in the 'core' project. But for some reason the 'widgets' project is not scanned by Spring. Again, when this is deployed, Spring scans them all just fine (I assume because of the context.xml that defines the JarResources to load). But I just can't seem to figure out how to get STS to "see" the project.
Edit: For clarity, here is the error I am getting:
May 22, 2018 2:32:00 PM org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.context.AnnotationConfigServletWebServerApplicationContext refresh
WARNING: Exception encountered during context initialization - cancelling refresh attempt: org.springframework.beans.factory.UnsatisfiedDependencyException: Error creating bean with name 'Controller': Unsatisfied dependency expressed through field 'widgetMap'; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No qualifying bean of type 'java.util.Map<java.lang.String, com.mycompany.project.widgets.WidgetInterface>' available: expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate. Dependency annotations: {#org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired(required=true)}
System is shutting down
May 22, 2018 2:32:00 PM org.springframework.scheduling.concurrent.ThreadPoolTaskExecutor shutdown
INFO: Shutting down ExecutorService 'getAsyncExecutor'
May 22, 2018 2:32:00 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService stopInternal
INFO: Stopping service [Tomcat]
May 22, 2018 2:32:00 PM org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.logging.ConditionEvaluationReportLoggingListener logAutoConfigurationReport
INFO:
Error starting ApplicationContext. To display the conditions report re-run your application with 'debug' enabled.
May 22, 2018 2:32:00 PM org.springframework.boot.diagnostics.LoggingFailureAnalysisReporter report
SEVERE:
***************************
APPLICATION FAILED TO START
***************************
Description:
Field widgetMap in com.mycompany.project.controller.Controller required a bean of type 'com.mycompany.project.widgets.WidgetInterface' that could not be found.
Action:
Consider defining a bean of type 'com.mycompany.project.widgets.WidgetInterface' in your configuration.

Answer 1

I resolved the issue.
Turns out I was not adding the individual widgets to my build path, but only the 'widgets' class.
Because I was using an #Autowired Map object, I needed at least one of my WidgetInterface implementations on the build path. Since the widget implementation projects were not present, it could not properly instantiate the map, and was erroring out.