Feature Export

PDE provides a Feature Export wizard to export features and constituent plug-ins and fragments into a form that is suitable for deployment. The wizard shields you from Ant scripts and does not pollute your workspace with resources generated during the build operation. The wizard is available under File > Export... > Plug-in Development > Deployable features .

Feature Selection

The wizard displays all the non-binary features found in the workspace.

Select the features that you want to export. If you find yourself exporting the same set of features over and over, you can press Working Set... to define a working set.

Features are built recursively; therefore, in the case where one feature includes another feature, only the top-level feature needs to be selected in order to export them both.

Destination

You can choose to export the features and their constituent plug-ins to a directory or to a ZIP archive.

If you choose to export to a Directory (the default), the features will be placed in a features/ subdirectory and the plug-ins will be placed in a plugins/ subdirectory of the chosen directory.

If you choose to export to an Archive file, all of the features and plug-ins will be packaged into a single ZIP archive. Also, the root directory structure inside the ZIP starts with features/ and plugins/.

Options

The Include source code option results in the exporting of source code as well as binaries. If a plug-in is packaged as a JAR, the source code will be placed in a src/ folder at the root of the JAR. If the plug-in is packaged as a flat directory, the source code will be placed in a source ZIP inside the plug-in directory as a sibling to the library JAR. Refer to the Source Code Locations document for details on the source archive naming convention.

The Package as individual JAR archives option packages features and their constituent plug-ins as JARs. If the option is not selected, then the features are exported as flat directories, while their constituent plug-ins are packaged as specified in the feature.xml markup. Plug-in entries that are marked with unpack="false" in the feature.xml are exported as JARs; otherwise, they are exported as directories.

The Save as Ant script option lets you save the settings of the export operation so that it can be re-executed at a later time without having to go through the wizard again. Like the export operation, the Ant task runs as an asynchronous job; therefore, it may not be suitable to incorporate it as a part of a larger Ant script.

JAR Signing

The JAR Signing tab is only visible when the Package as individual JAR archives option is selected on the Options tab.

To sign the JARs, you must be running Eclipse with a full JDK, rather than just a JRE.

The Keystore location, Alias and Password fields are all required for the signing operation.

Java Web Start

The Java Web Start tab is only available when the Directory option is selected on the Destination tab and the Package as individual JAR archives option is selected on the Options tab.

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The Site URL and JRE version fields are both required.