Android: Easier Source Linking in Eclipse

In my prior post Android: Attaching Sources to Libraries in Eclipse I noted that ADT version r20 added the ability to link sources to libraries in the Android Dependencies classpath container in Eclipse. Although this was a welcome addition, the method used to link sources is a bit cumbersome: you must create a .properties file alongside each library, and add a property that points to the source jar.

I felt this could be a lot simpler if you are willing to adopt a convention for the location of source jars. Once the convention is established, adding linked sources is as simple as placing the source jar in the expected location. This makes the process as seamless as the Android Dependency container is for adding libraries in the first place.

So I’ve made this possible via a new libproperties task in my zutubi-android-ant project. This task inspects the jars in your libs/ directory, looks for corresponding source jars by naming convention, and adds appropriate .properties files when sources are found. If you’re willing to accept the default convention, where source a source jar for library libs/foo.jar is placed at libs/src/foo-source.jar, then this simple Ant target can be used to generate the required .properties files for you:

<target name="link-sources">
    <zaa:libproperties/>
</target>

Of course you’ll need to import the zutubi-android-ant tasks into your build file first. If you want to ensure sources are present for all libraries, set the attribute failOnMissingSrc to true and your build will fail if any source jar is missing. You can even establish your own conventions, using a regular expression to match the libraries and a replacement string to generate paths to source jars:

<target name="link-sources">
    <-- libs/alib-1.3.jar maps to libs/src/alib-src-1.3.jar -->
    <zaa:libproperties failOnMissingSrc="true"
                         jarPattern="(.+)-([0-9.]+)\.jar"
                         srcReplacement="src/$1-src-$2.jar"/>
</target>

Head over to the new zutubi-android-ant home page for more details, including quick-start instructions to get the tasks installed in your build in minutes.