Linking

So what is this about?
To understand this you have to know that eclipse works with it's won so called "workspace" which is basically a directory in which eclipse saves it's projects and all the corresponding files. The problem with this is that you need the mission folders in the ArmA missions directory in order to start/play them. The possibilities without linking are quite limited and not really handy. The first one would be to create missions in the old way from the editor and open the SQF-files from there via "Open With...". The other one would be to manually copy the folders from the workspace into the misisons directory and vice versa. As you can see neither of them are future solutions as this is really annoying!

And that's where Linking comes into play.
The Linking process takes this responsibility from you and creates a "link" between the eclipse workspace and the missions directory. Basically it is charged with the task of copying the files between the directories so you don't have to worry about that.
In order to work properly you have to make sure that you have set the preferences properly as the Linking process is heavily dependent on those information.

So what exactly is part of this Linking?

• autoExport: This is an option that can be set for each project individually via a file called "link.sqdev" inside your SQDevProject (more about SQDevFiles). This is exactly the above mentioned process of file copying between these directories.
  Note: Only if the autoExport attribute is set to "true" in the link.sqdev the project's content will get synchronised after saving an SQF-file!
• Import: This feature is provided via a wizard. Concrete it will import any valid mission folder (created by the editor) and imports it to the eclipse workspace as an SQDevProject.
• Export: This feature is also provided via a wizard and does the opposite of the import wizard: It will copy any SQDevProject as a mission folder to wherever you want