Organizing Eclipse Projects With Working Sets

One of the more useful features of the Eclipse platform is the organizational capabilities it gives you. In particular, Working Sets allow you to group your projects together in logical categories or sets. What’s really nice is that a project can belong to more that one Working Set which allows you enormous flexibility in how you classify and work with projects. For example, I’ve broken my projects into Java and Flash sets and “work” and “experimental” sets as well as a catch all “all projects” set. One thing to keep in mind is that you can use Eclipse and its powerful organizational capibilities with projects which are not related to coding at all. As an example, I use Eclipse at the office to organize all RoboHelp Documentation Projects. I’ve included a Captivate movie which walks you through setting up a working set, or you can follow the steps below.

1. In the Package Explorer pane click the drop-down arrow menu and choose “Select Working Set” from the drop down menu.
2. Click the “New…” button from the Select Working Set Dialog window.
3. Choose the Working Set Type you wish to create and click Next.
4. Create a name for your Working Set in the provided input text field.
5. Select the projects you wish to add to your new Working Set by selecting the appropriate check boxes and click Finish.
6. Now select the Package Explorer’s drop-down arrow menu again and choose the “Show” menu item. Verify that the “Working Sets” sub-menu item is selected and not the “Projects” sub-menu.
7. Create as many Working Sets as you desire.
8. Go back to the Package Explorer’s drop-down menu arrow menu and choose the “Select Working Sets” menu item again.
9. Use the check boxes in the Select Working Sets dialog box to toggle on the Working Sets you wish to be viewable in the Package Explorer and click OK.
10. The selected Working Sets should now be visible in the Package Explorer.