Comments on: Reading resources from a Eclipse plugin

By: Lars Vogel

Lars Vogel — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:37:20 +0000

@Alex at least you don’t need to import Eclipse classes in the second approach which I believe is better.

By: Alex Blewitt

Alex Blewitt — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:32:45 +0000

… was filed by me and says “getEntry and getResource inconsistent”) – basically, at runtime, bundle.getEntry and bundle.getResource load the same; but under PDE, resources are loaded from the root of your plugin whilst resources come from under the /bin or /classes directory. I don’t believe that’s fixed

By: Alex Blewitt

Alex Blewitt — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:30:06 +0000

Both of these are Eclipse-specific, of course. It’s actually a lot better/easier to use Class.getResourceAsStream() to pull the bytes out, which has the advantage of working across all OSGi systems and outside of OSGi too. Plus it uses the bundle of wherever the class was loaded from.

There is a bug in PDE (don’t have the ID but it wa

By: Lars Vogel

Lars Vogel — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:33:56 +0000

@Chris: Thanks for the feedback

@dzim: I agree with you that the second method is the better one.

By: dzim

dzim — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:48:31 +0000

Hi Lars,

The second option is really much more reliable!
I’ve done something quite similar a week or two ago where I stumbled over the first method, when the file was bundled within the plugin jar.
The problem was: The files in question where somthing I called resource-jars – that means they where jars itself… That made me loads of trouble.
The final idea was there:
1) create an “resource” extension point
2) load the urls into a URLClassLoader
3) retrieve the resources from within the URClassLoader via theire specific class loader dependent URL

It works, but it still have the look of a major quick hack

Greetings,
Daniel

By: Chris Roberts

Chris Roberts — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 02:31:58 +0000

Great tip! Thank you! Every time I’ve tried to do this in the past, it’s been a huge pain and I’ve usually resorted to writing code that just seems messy and left me thinking “there has to be a better way to do this.” Here are two better ways — thanks!