Book Image

Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Alex Blewitt
Book Image

Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Alex Blewitt

Overview of this book

Eclipse is used by everyone from indie devs to NASA engineers. Its popularity is underpinned by its impressive plug-in ecosystem, which allows it to be extended to meet the needs of whoever is using it. This book shows you how to take full advantage of the Eclipse IDE by building your own useful plug-ins from start to finish. Taking you through the complete process of plug-in development, from packaging to automated testing and deployment, this book is a direct route to quicker, cleaner Java development. It may be for beginners, but we're confident that you'll develop new skills quickly. Pretty soon you'll feel like an expert, in complete control of your IDE. Don't let Eclipse define you - extend it with the plug-ins you need today for smarter, happier, and more effective development.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – enabling and disabling menus items


The previous section showed how to hide or show a specific KeyBinding depending on the open editor type. However, it doesn't stop the command from being called via the menu, or from it showing up in the menu itself. Instead of just hiding the KeyBinding, the menu can be hidden as well by adding a visibleWhen block to the command.

The expressions framework provides a number of variables, including activeContexts, which contains a list of the active contexts at the time. Since many contexts can be active simultaneously, the active contexts is a list (for example, [dialogAndWindow,window,textEditor,javaEditor])—so to find an entry (in effect, a contains operation), an iterate with equals expression is used. Although it's possible to copy and paste expressions between places where they are used, it is preferable to reuse an identical expression.

  1. Open the plugin.xml file, and add declare an expression using the expressions extension point as...