Eclipse + Turn an Existing Project into a JPA Proj

Question

Is there a way to turn a normal Eclipse Project into a JPA Project?

I have a normal project with Entities in it and a Persistence.xml file, but it is not an eclipse recognized JPA project. What can I do?

Answer 1

You could also Right Click the eclipse project and click on configure which allows you to convert to a JPA project.

Answer 2

Eclipse knows the project type via the .project file in the root of the project. Try creating a new JPA project and compare the .project files.

Edit: You may also need to compare the .classpath files.

Answer 3

project properties --> project facets. There you can click on the JPA check-box and you have an JPA project.

Answer 4

You'll want to modify:

• your .project
• your .classpath (eventually)
• your .settings if you're unlucky

As Chris Nava said, the best way to do that is to create an empty JPA project and compare it with yours.

I found it is sometimes necessary to delete your original project (do not "delete project content on disk" !) and reimport it to make Eclipse happy.

Answer 5

Modifying the .project file by hand is the best way to add different "natures" to an Eclipse project. Like ptyx said: compare your current .project file to that of a project where the nature is what you want and merge the differences.