Import fails

[truher]

The 2027-alpha6 project importer doesn't work for us, probably because our gradle build file is strange in some way.

Is there a list of things it does, so I can just do them manually?

[ThadHouse]

We don't have a direct list, you'll have to compare what a fresh project looks like.

Note alpha 7 will also be heavily changing how gradlerio is hooked into, and also require a reimport and update.

[ThadHouse]

If you meant a list of what the importer does? All it does is create a new project, and copy your existing source code into it. It doesn't modify anything existing in your project, or try to be smart at all about anything you're doing in gradle.

[sciencewhiz]

Can you explain what you mean by it fails? Does it not start? Does it give an error message? Does it create a non-working project?

Can you link to your project you're trying to import?

[truher]

@ThadHouse ok, then I won't worry about it. I dimly remember cribbing from a template project the last time i did this import, in 2025.

@sciencewhiz it starts, and then "failed to determine robot class" and then "failed to update". it seems to have copied the "src" directory but that's all it does.

the project is team100/all26/lib, but I really don't want you to worry about it.

[sciencewhiz]

It looks like there's a few different things going on.

It fails to determine robot class because your build.gradle defines the ROBOT_MAIN_CLASS as "frc.robot.Main", but that doesn't exist, and in fact you don't have a main that I can find. Pre-2027 importers just copied the main.java file, but now that file is generated and the old one is parsed to find what the robot class is. I'm not quite sure how your project actually worked before, but that's definitely a non-standard change to project structure.

However, it should have prompted you to enter the robot class, and it doesn't. Looking back through several years of code, I don't think that's ever worked, so that's a bug in the VS Code extension.

Lastly, your projectYear is still 2026beta. That means you either didn't install a 2026 release, and only manually updated the gradle version, or you did install a 2026 release, and ignored importing. The main side effect that I can think of is that the vendor dependency manager would only show beta compatible vendordeps, and not the vendors released versions. If you don't use that feature, you might have been ok. Although we've now improved checking in 2027, and you might have more problems if everything isn't matching.

[truher]

Thanks for looking. it's a weird project, I guess. it's only ever used as a "library" by other projects that do have "main" files, though I run the lib tests independently in the CI.

Anyway, the good news is the initial manual fixing went fine, all my tests pass (about 900 tests), with only a few bits removed for now.

[00magikarp]

Hello, my team is having the same issue as well on our robot code, where the importer says "Failed to determine robot class. Enter it manually?," and clicking yes pops up the same VS code issue that @truher is experiencing. I tried this on our team's 2025 and 2026 repo and both didn't work. team4099/Offseason-2025 and team4099/Rebuilt-2026. We're trying to update to alpha-5

We might just wait for alpha-7 since it'll require a reimport anyways. cc @SirBeans

[sciencewhiz]

I tried this on our team's 2025 and 2026 repo and both didn't work. team4099/Offseason-2025 and team4099/Rebuilt-2026. We're trying to update to alpha-5

We might just wait for alpha-7 since it'll require a reimport anyways. cc @SirBeans

Given that your code is Kotlin, I don't thing I'd expect that the importer would work.

[00magikarp]

Yeah true, which is unfortunate because the importer has worked for us in years prior. But given the mention of how it generates the main.java file now, I see how that may(?) be part of the issue

[truher]

Before this season I never really thought about what the importer was for, or what it did. If all it does is makes a new project and copies the code into it, maybe it would be better to have transparent, obvious importing instructions rather than an opaque and error-prone import automation?

[ThadHouse]

It also has some infrastructure to do namespace and classname changes.

If we did document it, all we would say is to create a new project, copy your classes over, and then fix all the namespace issues. Since we have 0 clue how teams modify their projects, actually creating how to change projects is not worth the effort. Because the teams that have issues with the importer are always teams that have changed things about the build.

[00magikarp]

Is there a way to get a "clean" version of the build.gradle, so that we can make the manual changes ourselves

[ThadHouse]

Create a new project, and then take everything else from there. Or copy your code into that new project.