I was working on a WebObjects project that needed some reports for which I was using ReportMill. Now the ReportMill templates are to be kept in the Resources folder of the WOLips project (I use Eclipse/WOLips/Project Wonder - is there any WO developer out there that does not use this combo? Please send me an email!!!).

First cut at the reports - obviously it wouldn't work. I thought I had figured out the problem (the object that you actually pass to the report wasn't bound correctly to the table in the template) and fixed it. Tried it again. No luck. Made some more changes. Nope. Started the template from scratch. Nothing.

Then I don't know what struck me. I cleaned the project. Voila! It worked. I had forgotten an important WOLips (Eclipse?) rule. Clean your project when you modify your resources. The build system figures out whenever you have changed your java files and auto-compiles and uses the latest. Not so for the resources. It does not by default check if the resources are modified and includes them afresh. You need to clean the project and then the new files will be picked up.

I am sure there must be a simpler way to get the latest resources to be picked up every time! Anybody?