When creating new packages and importing them into the Force.com IDE I recently saw many Referenced Packages which seem to have no connection to my app at all.

I would ignore this if not sometimes it woul prevent me from doing a "Refresh from Server" with a:

Refresh error: Metadata API received improper input. Please ensure file name and capitalization is correct. Load of metadata from db failed for metadata of type:ConnectedApp and file name:09HF000000003lw. package.xml /TravelExp Trunk/Referenced Packages/Salesforce Connected Apps line 1 Force.com retrieve problem

Attribution to: Robert Sösemann

Possible Suggestion/Solution #1

Wow this is strange! I've never seen this before either, mainly because i create my project in such a way to avoid downloading this, see below. Regarding what this is, it is most interesting, more so the contents of them, typically these are contents of managed packages in your org. But looking through some in my org reveals some very interesting package.xml and .module files?

I've searched the Metadata API and Metadata WSDL for references and find none, so maybe they are some local Eclipse plugin concept, not sure. It may be possible to dig deeper by tracing the requests Eclipse makes to Salesforce.

Avoiding Reference Packages Download in Eclipse

What i do know is i generally avoid the overhead of the Referenced Packages by select None when creating the Force.com project and prompted for the initial project contents, then once the project is created, right click and selected Add/Remove Metadata Components... to add/subscribe to what I need to work on the contents of the org. This results in an empty Referenced Packages node in the project explorer.

Attribution to: Andrew Fawcett
This content is remixed from stackoverflow or stackexchange. Please visit https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/31518