android eclipse driving me mad?

Question

I've quite new to Android development and specially Eclipse.

I'm busy on a project called, say 'HelloEclipse'. I've had some major changes ahead, in which I had to some very big changes.

So I made a zip file of c:\workspace\HelloEclipse, placed that in a save place. Went on to work on my project. Few hours later, I wanted to go back to the saved situation. Closed Ecplise, rebooted my computer, because I wanted to make sure there were no locked files. Deleted the old c:\workspace\HelloEclipse folder, place the version out of the ZIP file back.

This resulted in a totally corrupted workspace status. Could not go foward, nor backward. I've ended up, creating a new project, and pasted in everything, took me hours. I think this is quite stupid Eclipse behavior. I've also tried ot, export/import with a archive from out of Eclipse, also not succesfull.

So the two questions;

1. How am I suppose to save projects (without installing anything like subversion)?

2. Why is saving the files not enough, and why does that make Eclipse barf?

Thanks in advance!

Dennis

Answer 1

In eclipse if you want to reimport an old project from a ZIP, don't just copy the project files to the workspace, instead, extract the files to a normal dir outside the workspace.

Open Eclipse normally and select File>New Project>Android Project, just as you would to to create a new Android project, but then in the new android project window, you have a radio button giving you the choice to Create project from existing source, point it to the directory where you have extracted your old project and it should be re-imported to the WorkSpace alright.

Or do File>Import>Import existing project into workspace.

But in any case, don't put the files in the workspace manually to avoid conflicts, Eclipse will copy the files it needs itself upon importing.

Answer 2

There are hidden workspace files that you may have missed -- specifically, .classpath and .project. That said, it's a lot easier to make a backup copy (for example, of a released version so you can continue developing while supporting the release) by simply right-clicking on the top-level of the project in Eclipse and selecting Copy, then right-clicking and selecting Paste. The result will be a copy of the project after an opportunity to name the copy.

If you want to zip projects, you can do that by exporting them. If you want to delete existing projects, you should do that from inside Eclipse with a right-click. You can import the zip you previously exported.

Answer 3

If by save, you meant backing up the best something would be to create a local repository. If I were you, I would backup my code in an online repository too; to save it from hardware crashes or other disasters.

In your problem, you could have tried deleting the project alone and import the backup copy(from the zipped file) instead of deleting the entire workspace. Can't pinpoint the exact reason of why eclipse barfed but maybe because it messed up the workspace settings for eclipse. On a related note, I found this on the net.

Eclipse is rather troublesome at times but AFAIK it's the best IDE for android.

Answer 4

First of all, after several months of developing with eclipse I moved to IntelliJ (they have a community edition) and I found it much much better. In intelliJ you can save local history, for example, you can set-up a label and go back to that label whenever you like without losing anything.

As for eclipse, you probably didn't zip some hidden files or something. In addition, I remember having some similar problem, I had to resync the files with the project, try this one

Good Luck

Answer 5

I do the same thing with my projects. Instead of going through windows explorer to copy the files, I find copying the entire project from within Eclipse (right click the project in the explorer window pane, click copy, then click outside of the project and click paste) works just fine. When you paste it, you can specify a new save location and project name, which can be your backup space. Then you can switch between versions of the project no problem.