# Calling custom tasks when importing/refreshing a project

**URL:** <https://discuss.gradle.org/t/calling-custom-tasks-when-importing-refreshing-a-project/26924>\
**Category:** Buildship\
**Created:** [May 14, 2018, 2:33pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/calling-custom-tasks-when-importing-refreshing-a-project/26924 "2018-05-14T14:33:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Thierry](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/gradle/user_avatar/discuss.gradle.org/thierry/32/2505_2.png) [@Thierry](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/Thierry)\
**Post date:** [May 14, 2018, 2:33pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/calling-custom-tasks-when-importing-refreshing-a-project/26924/1 "2018-05-14T14:33:31Z")

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I’m in the process of migrating a project from Gradle 3.5 to the latest. Developers are used to the Gradle Gui (which disappeared with Gradle 4 I think), so I’m looking into Buildship as a much better alternative.  
However, I miss three essential features:

- setting the project’s text file encoding to UTF8 (which is not the default encoding in Eclipse where I live)
- setting the Java Editor’s Save Actions (this ensures everyone uses the same code style and minimizes formatting changes across developers)
- SonarLint configuration

To this effect, I have two Gradle tasks that are triggered when ‘gradle eclipse’ is called, by making the eclipseProject task depend on my tasks.  
However, when Buildship imports/refreshes a project, the ‘eclipseProject’ task is not called.

Is there a way to trigger custom tasks when importing projects? Or better yet, is there a way to declare this via Gradle (there wasn’t in 3.5, and there doesn’t seem to be in the latest either)?  
For reference, here’s one of the tasks:

```
File resourcesPrefs = file('.settings/org.eclipse.core.resources.prefs')
task cleanEclipseUtf8(type: Delete) { delete resourcesPrefs }
cleanEclipseProject.dependsOn cleanEclipseUtf8
task eclipseUtf8 {
	doLast {
	    logger.info('generating ' + resourcesPrefs.getCanonicalPath())
	    resourcesPrefs.getParentFile().mkdirs()
	    resourcesPrefs.write('eclipse.preferences.version=1\n')
	    resourcesPrefs.append('encoding/<project>=UTF-8')
	}
}
eclipseProject.dependsOn eclipseUtf8

```

Edit: added SonarLint to the list of things that I lost when using Buildship

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**Author:** ![lukeu](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/gradle/user_avatar/discuss.gradle.org/lukeu/32/6089_2.png) [@lukeu](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/lukeu)\
**Post date:** [May 14, 2018, 3:51pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/calling-custom-tasks-when-importing-refreshing-a-project/26924/2 "2018-05-14T15:51:11Z")

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> Is there a way to trigger custom tasks when importing projects?

Firstly, I don’t know about that, (nor about making tasks depend on `eclipseProject` in Buildship).

If you don’t find a cleaner solution via the Gradle DSLs, the main backdoor to advanced twiddling seems to be the [`eclipse { }` block](https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.plugins.ide.eclipse.model.EclipseModel.html).

Unfortunately there’s [an issue](https://github.com/eclipse/buildship/issues/694) whereby code inside `eclipse { project { beforeMerged & whenMerged} }` are not invoked by Buildship’s “Refresh Gradle Project” action, which makes it inconsistent with generating `.project` files via invoking `gradle eclipse` on the command-line. (I’m looking at jumping in and fixing this in my spare time.)

But this let me think of one possible workaround: there are similar “hooks” defined in `eclipse { classpath { } }` which do get called by Buildship. There’s also `eclipse { jdt }`- but I’ve never tried that. It might be possible to add some “arbitrary code” in these to generate your `.settings` after which Eclipse will _hopefully_ read it at the same time it reads the refreshed `.project` file.

(For the UTF8 part specifically, you may want to vote for

- [this buildship issue](https://github.com/eclipse/buildship/issues/344)
- and possibly: [this gradle issue](https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/898) )

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Thierry](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/gradle/user_avatar/discuss.gradle.org/thierry/32/2505_2.png) [@Thierry](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/Thierry)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2018, 1:23pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/calling-custom-tasks-when-importing-refreshing-a-project/26924/3 "2018-05-15T13:23:23Z")

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Thanks Luke, I went with using `eclipse { project {whenMerged}`, this works reasonably well (saw that you started working on [issue 694](https://github.com/eclipse/buildship/issues/694), hope that’ll work out!).

Didn’t want to go this route at first because using tasks is cleaner & more effective (only run if inputs have changed), but realized my old tasks didn’t have any inputs/outputs, so I’m not losing anything here.

Having the option to call custom tasks would be better, still. If anyone from Buildship is listening, I’m curious to have an opinion on this.

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**Author:** ![donat](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/gradle/user_avatar/discuss.gradle.org/donat/32/7798_2.png) [@donat](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/donat)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2018, 4:20pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/calling-custom-tasks-when-importing-refreshing-a-project/26924/4 "2018-05-15T16:20:53Z")

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We are indeed listening 🙂

We are aware that [executing tasks upon synchronization](https://github.com/eclipse/buildship/issues/265) is a highly requested feature. The plan is to implement it after the 3.0 release. The project is currently a bit understaffed, so I can’t make any promises about a deadline, but it should happen.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Thierry](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/gradle/user_avatar/discuss.gradle.org/thierry/32/2505_2.png) [@Thierry](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/Thierry)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2018, 4:51pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/calling-custom-tasks-when-importing-refreshing-a-project/26924/5 "2018-05-15T16:51:39Z")

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Thanks @donat, wasn’t aware of this ticket, nice to know that it will happen !