m2Eclipse plugin: What does 'Resolve Workspace Artifacts' do?

Question

I'm sorry if I am asking a possibly-trivial question, but I am having so much trouble finding out exactly what Resolve Workspace Artifacts does in the Maven build window in the Eclipse IDE, using the M2Eclipse plugin. I'm referring to this:

Does anyone have any idea? I tried google-ing and stackoverflow-ing the solution; there are lots of bug requests/reports but no clear-cut descriptions of this option. Thanks for the help.

Solution

Assume you have two or more projects in your workspace e.g. project1, project2 and so on. If project1 is dependent on project2 and project3, you just need to define the dependency of project1 on project2 and project3.

By enabling Resolve Workspace Artifacts, m2Eclipse will auto-build the SNAPSHOT JAR of project2 and project3 and add in the classpath of project1.

In other words, it resolves the dependencies with workspace projects.

Comments

[Andreas Covidiot]

it it does not work, it could be e.g. due to a dependency version mismatch similar to here: stackoverflow.com/a/32308875/1915920

[dokaspar]

If I "close" a project in Eclipse, is it still being resolved?

[Cristiano]

@dokaspar, if you close the project then m2e will try to resolve it against to remote/local repositories.