InstallingEnvironment

Introduction

Developing an AnnotationProcessor is not something very common, but hopefully we went through many different bugs and solved them. We now have a quite stable and clean dev environment, so you should be able to contribute to AndroidAnnotations by following these simple steps.

Installing the environment

• Install Git
• Install Maven
• Install Eclipse Juno
• Install the latest version of the Android SDK and the Android Eclipse Plugin (ADT)
• Install the latest version of the m2e-android and m2e plugins:
  • Start Eclipse, then select Help > Install New Software.
  • Click Add, in the top-right corner.
  • In the Add Repository dialog that appears, enter "m2e-android" for the Name and the following URL for the Location: http://rgladwell.github.com/m2e-android/updates/
  • In the Available Software dialog, select the checkbox next to Android Connector for M2E and click Next.
  • In the next window, you'll see a list of the tools to be downloaded. Click Next.
  • Read and accept the license agreements, then click Finish. If you get a security warning saying that the authenticity or validity of the software can't be established, click OK.
  • When the installation completes, restart Eclipse.

Getting the sources

• Fork the repository
• Clone the repository to your computer: git clone git@github.com:YOUR_USERNAME/androidannotations.git

Importing in Eclipse

• Go to File > Import > General > Existing Projects into Workspace, and import the androidannotations-dependencies project.

• Go to File > Import > Maven > Existing Maven Projects, open the AndroidAnnotations folder and import all the projects (all the pom.xml files).

• Please note that you won't need the functional-test-1-5 and the rest-api-test-1-5 projects in this eclipse workspace, so you can remove them immediately after importing. However, we need to import them to benefit from the automatic discovery and installation of m2e plugin (namely, the connectors for the maven-android-plugin and the maven-jar-plugin).

• In the androidannotations project, open src/main, right click on eclipse and select Build Path > Use as source folder. Then open the build path configuration and add the eclipse core runtime plugin dependency to the build path.

• Go to Run > Run Configurations... and double click on Eclipse Application, and click Run.

Note : I encountered a problem with running Eclipse on a 32bits JVM with a 64bits Mac, which was simply solved by adding -D32 to the VM arguments of the run configuration.

• This new eclipse is launched on a new workspace.
• Go to File > Import > Maven > Existing Maven Projects, open the AndroidAnnotations folder and import the functional-test-1-5 (functional-test-1-5/pom.xml) and the rest-api-test-1-5 projects (rest-api-test-1-5/pom.xml).
• The generated classes are not there yet, so do a Project > Clean... to let AndroidAnnotations generate them.
• If you still have compilation errors on a project, claiming that the generated classes are missing, open the project Properties > Java compiler > Annotation Processing and change the name of the Generated source directory. Click Apply, then change it back to .apt_generated and apply again. You should be good to go, if not, then let us know ;-) .

Running the functional tests

• Select the functional-test-1-5 then click on Run > Run Configurations... and double click on JUnit. Change the test runner to JUnit4. In the bottom part, select the Eclipse JUnit Runner.
• Go to Classpath and click Advanced on the right. Select Add Folders, and select functional-test-1-5 > target > android-classes. Also add the folder functional-test-1-5 > bin > classes

Notes:

To start the tests, just run the previously created Run Configuration

You can start the "Eclipse application" in debug mode, and put breakpoints in your code. You will also benefit from hot replace of code (only inside methods)

To see your changes in the code, you have to restart the 2nd eclipse. We didn't find any better solution, but tell us if you do!