Book Image

Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example : Beginner's Guide

By : Dr Alex Blewitt
Book Image

Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example : Beginner's Guide

By: Dr Alex Blewitt

Overview of this book

<p>As a highly extensible platform, Eclipse is used by everyone from independent software developers to NASA. Key to this is Eclipse’s plug-in ecosystem, which allows applications to be developed in a modular architecture and extended through its use of plug-ins and features.<br /><br />"Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example Beginner's Guide" takes the reader through the full journey of plug-in development, starting with an introduction to Eclipse plug-ins, continued through packaging and culminating in automated testing and deployment. The example code provides simple snippets which can be developed and extended to get you going quickly.</p> <p>This book covers basics of plug-in development, creating user interfaces with both SWT and JFace, and interacting with the user and execution of long-running tasks in the background.</p> <p>Example-based tasks such as creating and working with preferences and advanced tasks such as well as working with Eclipse’s files and resources. A specific chapter on the differences between Eclipse 3.x and Eclipse 4.x presents a detailed view of the changes needed by applications and plug-ins upgrading to the new model. Finally, the book concludes on how to package plug-ins into update sites, and build and test them automatically.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – using DialogSettings


A more useful alternative to the Memento pattern is DialogSettings, which provides a properties-like interface for storing strings and other basic primitive values. This stores its information in an XML file, and can be acquired as a standard extension to the UI plug-in or created from a file location. The settings store is used to store values persistently, and is saved automatically when the plug-in shuts down. At startup, it is loaded automatically. Perform the following steps:

  1. To migrate the settings for the last tab selected to use DialogSettings, remove the init() and save() methods from the TimeZoneView and replace them with the following in the createPartControl():

    final IDialogSettings settings =Activator.getDefault().getDialogSettings();
    lastTabSelected = settings.get("lastTabSelected");
  2. The call to getDialogSettings() comes from the UIPlugin class. Once the DialogSettings have been acquired, it can be used to store and retrieve values. Update...