Excluding/Disabling Validation in Eclipse

Question

I have the (mis)fortune of having a large project source-base in which I am working primarily on PHP and JavaScript. I have to have the full project area as the project root in Eclipse, but unfortunately this includes several directories that drive the validation built into WST/DLTK/etc. nuts.

I have tried disabling all validators in the project properties. I have gone into the validators one at a time and added rules to the "Exclude Group" set to exclude the specific folders. I have removed the folders from the PHP build path in the project properties. And yet, my Problems view/tab is still littered with thousands of red flags that stem mostly from a folder that we use to keep copies of external elements (Apache, PHP, etc.). You know, typical "have a copy of the specific versions we currently use" sort of thing.

The signal-to-noise ratio is so bad that I'm unable to use the view at all, which is a shame. If I'm not going to have the benefits of the IDE, I might as well be using vim for this (I use it for other stuff, but for this codebase a good IDE is a better choice, providing I can get it to work). It seems to me that it would be an obvious feature to be able to right-click a folder in a project and select "Exclude from Validation", but alas there is no such feature. Is there another way to get the validators (PHP, HTML, etc.) to ignore the folders I need ignored?

Answer 1

Hello, I had the same problem with the web app i'm developping. I ended up disabling automatic build, and building once a day (Project->Build automatically), that way i still get the benefits of code completion from libraries, while speeding up the program on older computers.

Answer 2

I came upon this question while looking for the same answer. I will list the steps I did here and hopefully it will help someone in the future.

I am using Eclipse 4.1 and I do the following to exclude validation for specific xml files. I am sure if you configure the different validators it will work for other files as well.

Go to Preferences -> Validation Find the Validator you wish to change and select settings (not all of the validators have settings, hopefully yours do).

In the settings you can add an Exclude Group where you can add a rule to specify to exclude the validator for specific extensions, folder or file name, project nature, facet or content type.

Answer 3

I have Eclipse for PHP Developers and I was dealing with the same issue.

In addition tot he excellent answers above, I have one more suggestion.

My first recommendation is not to use Aptana unless you actually want those validators (as they are nearly impossible to turn off from my experience).

Beyond that, go to File -> Properties -> Builders, and deselect "Validation" and "Script Builder" and "JavaScript Validator".

So far it's helped speed up some operations tremendously.

I also recommend disabling "Automatic Build". Because you're using PHP, the odds that you actually need it to build anything if you don't want validation is slim.

In the main menu, go to Project and uncheck "Build Automatically". You will want to build your project every now and then by right clicking on the project and selecting "Build Project".

All the above steps have helped me get the basic editor, which is exactly what I wanted.

Answer 4

I found in the project properties there is a Builders category. In the list of builders I had a JavaScript Builder. I deselected this builder and all my annoying javascript validation woes went away.

Answer 5

this worked for me: Properties > Builders section and unchecking the corresponding box. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=317833

seems to be a bug in some versions of eclipse.

Answer 6

There are more gloabal validation parameters. You can suspend all validation (or only the ones you don't need) by going to:

Window > Preferences > Validation. 

Here, check the box "Suspend all validators".

Alternatively, uncheck the validators you don't need from the list below.
A full build will be requested which might take some time. But Eclipse will run a lot faster afterwards [But without validation of course]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesuspresley/5094048124/