How to specify build order in an Android project using AndroidAnnotations

Question

I use AndroidAnnotations, and since a couple of days, Eclipse sometimes (not always) fails to compile code that uses classes generated by AndroidAnnotations (pre-compile generated code):

My example is:

My project has MainActivity, AndroidAnnotations creates an extended class MainActivity_ under .apt_generated.

Elsewhere in the DetailActivity, my code has a reference to MainActivity_:

My solution so far was to remove the code, compile, then add the code back. However, this is far from elegant. It also is quite annoying and time-consuming.

Am I missing some setting?

Does the order in the "Order and Export" page have any influence? I've tried to move the .apt_generated directory up and down, with no positive effect.

I was thinking that this is the same concept used by Android's resource class R. I never had any issues with code that use resources failing to compile.

Answer 1

As per comments above from piwai the anwser is:

Eclipse 3.5+ - Annotation processor: Generated classes cannot be imported

Answer 2

When does that happen?

• When you open Eclipse?
• When you open a project previously closed?
• When you do a project > clean?

This problem looks like a bug in Eclipse. It looks like sometimes it compiles a class, then run the annotation processor, then doesn't update / recompile the classes that had missing symbols.

A simple tricks that seems to do the job: go to the properties of the project, change the name of the annotation processing folder from .apt_generated to something else (and then back to .apt_generated), and accept the rebuild. This seems to trigger a build in the right order, and reset everything right.

Note that AndroidAnnotations uses annotation processing, which is a standard java 6 concept. It's different from the Android R class, which isn't linked to any java standard.

Does that help?