Building applications in Eclipse

Disable automatic builds

Micro Focus recommends that you disable automatic builds so changes you make to your projects or in the code do not start a build automatically:

Click Project and uncheck Build Automatically.

Only build selected files or selected projects

Avoid building all projects in your workspace or all files within the project.

To build only selected projects:

Ensure automatic builds are switched off.
Select one or more projects in COBOL Explorer, right-click the selection and click Build Project.

To build only selected files:

Ensure automatic builds are switched off.
Select one or more files in your project, right-click the selection and click Compile.

Configure Eclipse to clean and build only selected projects:

Click Project > Clean.
Uncheck Clean projects selected below.
Ensure Start a build immediately is checked and click Build only the selected projects.
Select the projects that you want to rebuild.

Do not rebuild all artifacts

Configure Eclipse so it does not delete the build artifacts when you change the project's properties settings. This means you will not have to rebuild the project and build all artifacts.

Click Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > Builder
Set Delete build artifacts in output folder when project settings change to Prompt.

Warning: Switching this option off means that some of the project's settings might not be reflected in the build artifacts. Ensure that you rebuild any artifacts when you need to use them.

Build native COBOL projects in parallel

On multi-CPU machines, you can enable faster, parallel multi-processor compilation of multiple files in native COBOL projects. To do this:

Click Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > Builder.
Specify a number for "Maximum compilations/links to execute concurrently in Set Multi-processor compilation/linking that correspond to the number of CPUs.

See Building COBOL Applications for more information.

Build COBOL JVM applications incrementally

You can configure a JVM COBOL project to build incrementally meaning Eclipse builds only the files that have changed, so reducing the build overhead.

See Compiling JVM COBOL for details on how to enable incremental builds.

Build without code coverage or profiler information

If not needed, do not build your applications with code coverage or profiler information as these settings mean the builds take longer to complete. Note that changing these settings in the project will trigger a project build if Eclipse is configured to build projects automatically.