A few months ago I converted to full time software engineer away from my past trade as an IT professional serving in various roles.  In this new position, I now work in Eclipse, an IDE, for an average of 8 hours a day.  One thing that has been bugging me has been the annoyance of searching for resources (source files) by name and finding 3 copies of each file referencing the source file (my true interest), the compiled result (which I’m not interested in) and even a couple of copies from linked folders that assist the Eclipse JSP validator in finding resources for it’s code completion and on-the-fly reference checking.

Today it finally bugged me enough that I went digging.  Surprisingly, it only took about 5 minutes to find an attribute on folders named “Derived”.  When set, this flag marks the folder and all resources beneath it as “derived”, or better described as generated or compiled from other source files.

Upon switching this flag for the 3 or 4 locations that contained my duplicate resources in my searches, I found that Eclipse intelligently removed those resource references from my search results because they were marked as “derived”.

Thank you Eclipse for making my life just a little bit easier.  Now, I just need more memory and the ability to manage log4j log files straight from Eclipse and I’ll be set.