Eclipse Papercuts

The Eclipse PDE templates are fantastic to help people to learn the platform and to get oven the first initial resistence to start with Eclipse RCP or Eclipse Plugin development.

Templates indicates to their consumers that they represent best development practices. This puts a certain burden on the quality to the templates. Unfortunately the PDE RCP templates in Eclipse 3.5 were all based on actions which I believe are superseded by Eclipse Commands.

I have seen in the past lots of questions regarding actions in the Eclipse RCP and PDE newsgroups. I believe that at least some of these questions are based on the fact that the PDE templates still promote actions.

I’m therefore happy to see the changes of Bug 265231 applied for the “RCP with a view” template for the upcoming Eclipse 3.6. Special thanks for this to Chris Aniszczyk.

It also looks good for the mail example. It seems that work is happening in Bug 253105

Actions are (a little bit more) dead. Long live the command!

In this episode of Eclipse Papercuts I explain how you get bundles for popolar Java libraries for your Eclipse plugin development.

I believe it has advantages to work with plugin projects instead of pure Java projects even if the plan is not to create Eclipse plugins / RCP applications.

The core strength of OSGi for this scenario is in my opinion the encapsalation and protection of your inner classes. With OSGi bundles you decide which packages of your project are exported and therefore visible to other projects (via the tab Runtime in the editor for the file plugin.xml).

This leaves only one problem: If you are using externally libraries you have to convert them into bundles / plugins.

I would be nicer to consume pre-packages bundles. As I created a bug iText should be OSGi and tweeted about it Chris Aniszczyk pointed me to Eclipse Orbit.

Eclipse Orbit provides lots of standard libraries already pre-packaged as bundles / plugins.

Lets see how you could get the iText version from Orbit. Check the Orbit FAQ to find out more.

You need to connect via cvs to the Eclipse cvs repository. CVS URL is :pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org/cvsroot/tools

Navigate to “org.eclipse.orbit”. Select “com.lowagie.text” and check it out.

Orbit keeps the different version of the library as cvs branches. Select your project and select Replace With -> Another Branch or Version…

After selecting the branch and pressing ok the system will download the library and you can start using the library.

In addition to Orbit you can also use the Springsource bundle repository. On this website you can search for bundles and download then directly. You can then import them as plugin projects into your workspace.

In Adding the error view to RCP application one commenter asked how he could add a view as a fast view to an Eclipse RCP application.

To add views as fast view to your RCP application you have to do two things:

1.) Add your view as “fast” via the perspective extension point

2.) Activate the FastViewBar via the ApplicationWorkbenchWindow Advisor (configurer.setShowFastViewBars(true);)

package de.vogella.test;

import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Point;
import org.eclipse.ui.application.ActionBarAdvisor;
import org.eclipse.ui.application.IActionBarConfigurer;
import org.eclipse.ui.application.IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer;
import org.eclipse.ui.application.WorkbenchWindowAdvisor;

public class ApplicationWorkbenchWindowAdvisor extends WorkbenchWindowAdvisor {

    public ApplicationWorkbenchWindowAdvisor(IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer configurer) {
        super(configurer);
    }

    @Override
	public ActionBarAdvisor createActionBarAdvisor(IActionBarConfigurer configurer) {
        return new ApplicationActionBarAdvisor(configurer);
    }

    @Override
	public void preWindowOpen() {
    	IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer configurer = getWindowConfigurer();

    	configurer.setInitialSize(new Point(1024, 800));
		configurer.setShowStatusLine(true);
		configurer.setTitle("Network Analyser");
		configurer.setShowFastViewBars(true);
    }

}

This should be sufficient to show your view in your RCP application in the fast view pane.

I recently got the question how you can put a file into the system clipboard.

SWT makes this trivial:

package de.vogella.desktop.clipboard;

import org.eclipse.swt.dnd.Clipboard;
import org.eclipse.swt.dnd.FileTransfer;
import org.eclipse.swt.dnd.Transfer;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display;

/**
 * Utility class for putting files into the system clipboard
 *
 * @author Lars Vogel
 */

public final class CopyFileToClipboard {

	private CopyFileToClipboard() {
		// Utility class, prevent instantiation
	}

	/**
	 * Copy a file into the clipboard
	 * Assumes the file exists -> no additional check
	 * @param fileName - includes the path
	 */

	public static void copytoClipboard(String fileName) {
		Display display = Display.getCurrent();
		Clipboard clipboard = new Clipboard(display);
		String[] data = { fileName };
		clipboard.setContents(new Object[] { data },
				new Transfer[] { FileTransfer.getInstance() });
		clipboard.dispose();
	}
}

Afer calling the method with a correct filename you should be able to paste the file, e.g. Strg+V into your system file browser.