I can add in external OSGi bundles into my PDE project and I can get them to show up in the Target Platform (although I need to perform a reload once I have added a new one), I do this with a "lib" directory in each project.
As my project has become more sophisticated I require some Spring bundles, and I looked to Ivy (the Ivy DE plugin) to manage the dependencies for me. This did a great job of finding all the bundles that were needed which get added to the classpath.
The problem is that I also need to add them to the target platform and I cannot find a way to get the target platform to look at the Ivy dependencies.
A possible workaround is to copy the Ivy dependencies into my lib directory. I'm very new to Ivy and cannot see a way to get it to copy dependencies to a local directory (to do that would seem to defy the point of Ivy). I also looked at adding the Ivy cache to the target platform (a crazy idea) but Eclipse couldn't find all the bundles because of the cache's directory structure.
Ivy is primarily designed to be embedded within an ANT build. In such a case you could use the retrieve task to decide where to save files within your build workspace:
<ivy:retrieve pattern="${dist.dir}/WEB-INF/lib/[artifact].[ext]" conf="runtime"/>
I'm not an expert on the ivy Eclipse plugin and whether this functionality is available for pure Eclipse builds.