maven & build-helper

I ran into a little issue with maven and the build-helper plugin today.

The background is as follows - I was part-mavenizing a project (long, boring work related story) and I needed to generate some source code using JAXB (which was a trial in and of itself - we're compiling on Java 1.4 and JAXB hates Java 1.4 - in the end I needed to use antrun to run the 1.0.0 version of xjc) and then have it compile as part of the main compile process. So build-helper to the rescue. The documentation states that you just add the plugin to the build-

...
     <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.1</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>add-source</id>
            <phase>generate-sources</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>add-source</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <sources>
                <source>some directory</source>
                ...
              </sources>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
...

Note the "some directory" for the source. I was trying to place the generated code into /target/generated-code/java, seeing as the generated code was output and output ends up in /target. It wouldn't work. I tried several variations on a theme, but as long as I kept trying to compile source that lived in target, maven would not see it. In the end, I placed the code in {$basedir}/src/generated/java (ie, in src, not target), pointed build-helper to it and it started to work.

While it works, it does mean I have more work ahead in order to get clean to work as expected.