I followed this tutorial Second Iteration: Adding Packages and Imports by Xtext. I was trying to make a cross reference like the one shown in the last picture of the tutorial, that I paste here:

In first example of the tutorial page I had simply to create a java project and a file mymodel.dmodel and everything works fine.
I noticed that in second example (named Second Iteration: Adding Packages and Imports) the cross-references don't work (I have some Could'nt resolve reference errors) with a simple java project.
However it works fine if I convert the project to an Xtext project.
Is this a normal behaviour or have I missed some configuration steps?