Saint's Log

Copying Image Files to Build Folder in Eclipse

Part of my Google Summer of Code project this summer involved building a visualization tool to help examine trace files used by JPF Guided Test and a related under-approximation scheduler. The visualization tool is in the Guided Test repository. I was using Eclipse to manage the project. Everything built correctly but the program didn’t work because the icons were not in the build folder as expected. A quick hint from stackoverflow was that the solution is to use Ant.

<target name="-pre-jar" description="Copy Images">
  <property name="images.dir" value="build/main/edu/byu/cs/guided/search/visualize/graphics" />

  <copy todir="${images.dir}">
    <fileset dir="./src/main/edu/byu/cs/guided/search/visualize/graphics" />
  </copy>
  <echo level="info" message="Visualization icons was copied."/>
</target>

The key is to use the “-pre-jar” target in the build.xml file to copy the files into the right spot. This change was part of the visualization check-in into the repository. Some documentation on Ant targets is available in the Apache Ant User Manual. This StackOverflow entry on adding resource files to a jar file with Ant has some useful hints as well.