Validation Errors in Eclipse and Alpha-Bits

Cartoons owned Saturday mornings, back when I was young enough to care. The commercials that wedged their way in and between The RoadRunner and The Justice League seemed to hawk either toys or breakfast cereal, all of which I longed for. My mother decried “sugar cereal” and preached the virtues of rolled oats.

One particular cereal commercial that lingers in my dwindling memory showed various calamities creeping up on the blissful muncher. Each time, at the precise moment preceding attack and doom, the happy eater would show his or her spoon spelling out the calamities’ titles in Alpha-Bits (“MONSTER”, “TORNADO”, “BOA CONSTRICTOR”), declare, “I ate ’em!”, and shovel the coveted sweet crunchiness down the hatch. The monster/villain/brute would promptly disappear. It was magical.

Today, I was working with a web project in Eclipse that had various dependencies and Gradle builds and GlassFish deployments and an Error in the Problem view had me at an impasse. It was some nonsense about a Validation error, with key pieces of data (like an explanation of what failed to validate glaringly missing). I tried turning off validators, but that hung Eclipse. I tried restarting Eclipse. I tried refreshing the project. I tried rebooting my Mac. No dice. Finally, I right-clicked the validation error in the Problem view to see if it would offer a menu.

It did.

One of the options was “Delete.”

No way.

I tried it.

I ate ’em!

Poof–it disappeared.

Weird.

Of course, Stack Overflow already knew that. It always knows.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3420536/how-do-you-clear-the-validation-errors-in-eclipse