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 – adding context menus


A context menu can be added to the TimeZoneTableView class and respond to it dynamically in the view's creation. The typical pattern for Eclipse 3 applications is to create a hookContextMenu() method, which is used to wire up the context menu operation with displaying the menu. A default implementation can be seen by creating an example view, or one can be created from first principles.

Eclipse menus are managed by a MenuManager. This is a specialized subclass of a more general ContributionManager, which looks after a dynamic set of contributions that can be made from other sources. When the menu manager is connected to a control, it responds in the standard ways for the platform for showing the menu (typically a context-sensitive click or short key). Menus can also be displayed in other locations, such as a view's or the workspace's coolbar (toolbar). The same MenuManager approach works in these different locations.

  1. Open the TimeZoneTableView class and...