Again - I need to play more with this, but a few months ago it was still a problem (i.e. the IDE just become a fancy notepad :)

I get that Maven is putting the resolved file in the build directory.
What I don't understand--and please bear with my naivety about Eclipse plugin development--is why we can't offer some sort of "smart" editor that is aware of the properties defined in the pom.xml file and can resolve them when it needs a value (such as the JTA data source name).
That is what I would like to do where we can - but will only work for our editors and projects. We don't control all of the IDE - sorry ;)
Anyway, the editor is just *one* part of this - then there is the whole set of framework specific models in place, i.e. JSF and JPA provided by WTP has their own little model which
expects things to be in a specific place and is not in any way extendable in this area (afaik).

btw. jta datasource name is an example of something we don't really need to resolve since it only exists at runtime....
what we want to control is that when you want to do Hibernate queries from the IDE you use a persistence.xml that is configured to run in J2SE;
but when deploying it should use the datasource name one - and this is not controllable with a mere property replacement because of how persistence.xml's are structured.

This would be precisely like Eclipse properties. Clearly Eclipse is able to offer paths that "extend" properties, so why can't the files which Maven marks as "filterable" work in the same way?
What do you mean by Eclipse properties ? you mean eclipse variables which are used a few places in eclipse ui ?

/max