With the gradle plugin in Eclipse, how can I get project dependencies like maven?

Question

I'm looking into migrating some of our ancient maven projects over to gradle (so shiny). Things are looking pretty good however I'm unable to get Eclipse/Gradle to adjust the project dependencies appropriately when I have 2 projects checked out. I'm hoping to use a repo for standard jar dependencies but be able to depend directly on a project if it is checked out.

Let's say ProjectB depends on ProjectA. As far as I understand the Eclipse/Maven plugin, it is able to a:

1. Interrogate the maven dependency for ProjectA and understand its group/artifact/version tuple.
2. Look through ProjectA eclipse project (if imported) to see if has the same group/artifact/version.
3. Replace the jar dependency with a project dependency.

This is a powerful feature because it means that a developer does not need to import ProjectA when they are working on ProjectB -- they just get it from the repo. But if they do have it imported, they can make a refactor to ProjectA in Eclipse and it will automagically refactor the dependent code in ProjectB.

How can I get eclipse/gradle to adjust the build-path so that there is a project dependency when available otherwise use the jar?

Things I've looked into:

• Gradle "multi-projects" but our code isn't in a hierarchy like that.
• Gradle includeFlat but this isn't some simple single directory structure.
• resolutionStrategy.dependencySubstitution but I couldn't seem to get it to work. I doubt that findProject(...) is able to find a project that is loaded into Eclipse to it can link the 2 projects together in the classpath.
• composite builds seem to use some of the language I'm looking for but it is about importing a build into another build.

Anyone else figured this out? Thanks much in advance.