Some times we have a need to create preference file that will pull in only specific things. We don't want to share our entire workspace settings with other developers, but they do want some of our settings. There seem to be different rules based on the type of Eclipse that you use, but the following worked for me using Rational Application Developer (which is just a commercialized version of the J2EE version of Eclipse).
The one key that seems to be absolutely necessary for the preference files to be imported is file_export_version. At the time of this writing, the value for that field should be 3.0. Without this field defined, the preferences will not be imported.
Here is an example of a preference file that I put together to share classpath variables
# this line is needed in order for eclipse to import properly
file_export_version=3.0
# classpath variables
/instance/org.eclipse.jdt.core/org.eclipse.jdt.core.classpathVariable.SYSEXT_LIB=U\:/SYSLibs/SysExt
/instance/org.eclipse.jdt.core/org.eclipse.jdt.core.classpathVariable.BCBSSC_JAR_LIB=U\:/Unit1
/instance/org.eclipse.jdt.core/org.eclipse.jdt.core.classpathVariable.LFS_DEP_LIB=U\:/SYSLibs/SYSExt/IBM/LotusForms/Server/4.0/WebformServer/redist/
/instance/org.eclipse.jdt.core/org.eclipse.jdt.core.classpathVariable.IBM_HOME=C\:/Program Files/IBM
/instance/org.eclipse.jdt.core/org.eclipse.jdt.core.classpathVariable.RAD_STD_LIB=U\:/SYSLibs/RAD803_StdLib
See more notes at http://jsturdevant.roughdraft.io/
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