Iterate through maven project's dependency jars with eclipse-resource-api (plugin development)

Question

I have a maven project. And i want to iterate through its dependency jar projects and read some property files in them. With eclipse resource api, i can get an IProject instance in workspace and access its classpath file.

Class-path has the following structure.

    <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.m2e.MAVEN2_CLASSPATH_CONTAINER">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
            <attribute name="org.eclipse.jst.component.nondependency" value=""/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>

How can i extract the actual dependency jar locations from this?

i was expecting something like this instead

<classpath>
 <classpathentry kind="var" path="M2_REPO/apache-xerces/xercesImpl/2.9.1/xercesImpl-2.9.1.jar"/>
 <classpathentry kind="var" path="M2_REPO/apache-xerces/xml-apis/2.9.1/xml-apis-2.9.1.jar"/>
</classpath>

2.Or is there any better approach than this to read through maven dependency jars programatically?

Answer 1

The getResolvedClasspath method of IJavaProject deals with resolving containers:

IProject project = ... get project

IJavaProject javaProject = JavaCore.create(project);

IClasspathEntry[] classPathEntries = javaProject.getResolvedClasspath(true);

The JavaDoc says:

This is a helper method returning the resolved classpath for the project as a list of simple (non-variable, non-container) classpath entries. All classpath variable and classpath container entries in the project's raw classpath will be replaced by the simple classpath entries they resolve to.