Gradle tasks fail to load upon Eclipse start, manual refresh works as expected

[vredez]

Expected Behavior

• Open workspace with Gradle project
• Gradle tasks are loaded successfully

Current Behavior

• Open workspace with Gradle project
• Gradle tasks are not loaded (error icon is shown within the view Gradle Tasks)
• Tasks load just fine when performing a manual refresh of Gradle tasks

Steps to Reproduce

• create a new empty Gradle project
• exit Eclipse
• start Eclipse and reopen workspace --> Gradle tasks fail to load

Your Environment

• Eclipse Buildship 3.1.9.v20240115-1636
• Eclipse IDE for Enterprise Java and Web Developers (includes Incubating components)
  Version: 2024-03 (4.31.0)
  Build id: 20240307-1437
• vanilla eclipse.ini
• Windows 11 21H2

[oleosterhagen]

With #1240 (commit: dcdf121) the fetch strategy has been changed when populating the Gradle Tasks view. Before the change this has been LOAD_IF_NOT_CACHED. Now it is FROM_CACHE_ONLY.

Here is the relevant comment from the code:

// set initial content (use fetch strategy FROM_CACHE_ONLY as we don't want to enforce
// a potentially expensive sync operation just because a view was opened)

So, this behavior is intentional.

One possible solution could be the introduction of a new preference option Refresh tasks when opening the Tasks View. When checked, the task view will always be populated when it is opened.

[vredez]

Good to know that this is desired behavior. From a users perspective it really seems like a bug though, for two reasons:

• Error icon is shown initially (which is the same as if errors occurred)
• Undocumented change of behavior w.r.t. prior releases

I can see the benefits of not loading the tasks automatically (especially since Eclipse gets slower every release anyways), but maybe a better indication of "not yet loaded" tasks could be implemented (question mark instead of error indicator for example).