<p>I use Eclipse, Maven, and Java in my development. I use Maven to download dependencies (jar files and javadoc when available) and Maven's eclipse plug-in to generate the .project and .classpath files for Eclipse. When the dependency downloaded does not have attached javadoc I manually add a link for the javadoc in the .classpath file so that I can see the javadoc for the dependency in Eclipse. Then when I run Maven's eclipse plugin to regenerate the .classpath file it of course wipes out that change.</p>

<p>Is there a way to configure Maven's eclipse plug-in to automatically add classpath attributes for javadoc when running Maven's eclipse plug-in?  </p>

<p>I'm only interested in answers  where the javadoc and/or sources are not provided for the dependency in the maven repository, which is the case most often for me. Using downloadSources and/or downloadJavadocs properties won't help this problem.</p>

Would having the sources for the dependency help? You can tell the eclipse plugin to download those (and refer to them in the .classpath) with
```
-DdownloadSources=true
```