# Processor Option Input Dialog

The Processor Option input dialog is reached from the Annotation Processing preferences pane. It allows processor options to be added or modified.

Options entered here will be presented to processors using the Java 5 Mirror APIs through the AnnotationProcessorEnvironment interface, or to processors using the Java 6 annotation processing APIs through the ProcessingEnvironment interface. For Java 5 processors, in order to be compatible with other implementations of this API, each option will be presented in two forms: as a key/value pair, and as a combined key corresponding to the command-line form of the option, namely "-Akey=value". For instance, an option with key "foo" and value "bar" would be presented both that way and as key "-Afoo=bar", value null. For Java 6 processors, the options are simply presented as a map of key/value pairs, without the -A and without the combined -Akey=value form.

Option values representing paths may begin with a percent-delimited token such as `%FOO%/`. If the token is the name of a classpath variable, it will be replaced with the current value of the variable at processor execution time. The special value `ROOT` expands to the absolute path of the workspace. For example, `%ROOT%/foo/bar.xml` might expand to `d:/my_workspace/foo/bar.xml`, and `%JRE_LIB%/rt.jar` might expand to `c:/jdk1.5.0/lib/rt.jar`. Similarly, the special value `PROJECT.DIR` expands to the absolute path of the current project.

Certain options are automatically provided to the processors; entering them in this dialog will have no effect, since the automatically provided values will override any values set here. The automatic options are described here.