I’ve hit this very annoying Eclipse error several times in the past and usually fluked my way through fixing it and never bothered recording how it was fixed (if I even knew).
“The deployment descriptor of the module yourAppplication.war cannot be loaded”
I remember my colleague once Googled the answer and it was something to do with removing a file, or an entry in a file inside the workspace plugins directory.
Well my EAR project got the error again today after migrating my WAR project to a new workspace manually via file system copying. My Google-Fu must be rusty today because it looked to me like no one had the problem.
On a hunch, I created a new EAR project and added my war to it – worked no problem. Led me to think that it’s the old EAR project’s metadata. So I deleted the project through Eclipse (incl files on disk) and re-imported it from our code repository.
Lo and be-hold Eclipse sorted itself out.
If anyone actually knows the file or entries that have to be reset in the workspace metadata please post.