How would you access Eclipse JDT index?

Question

How do I access the index that eclipse uses to do Java search, import, etc?

Answer 1

This old thread (for eclipse2!) mentioned:

In the meantime if you feel like indexes are not complete (open type doesn't show you a type which it should), you can workaround by:

• exiting Eclipse,
• find the index files in the metadata, and discard them all.
• Restart Eclipse,
• and activate the open-type dialog which will trigger proper reindexing.

Index files are located in:
<workspace>/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core/, you want to get rid of all '*.index' files in the doubt + 'savedIndexNames.txt'.

I just checked with my current Eclipse Helios 3.6.1, and those files are still around.

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More generally (and programmatically), the SearchParticipant API is involved with those files, ans mentioned in bug 308402

SearchParticipant has the method #selectIndexes and part of its documentation says "An index location represents a path in the file system to a file that holds index information." and to that effect we store our .index files in our own location and return those when the #selectIndexes method is called using the BasicSearchEngine.

You can see an example here.