eclipse e4 restore perspective on startup automatically - eclipse

We all know that by default eclipse saves application state in workbench.xmi and then recreates perspective only if this file is absent. However, I've got a project on e4 which ignores this file even though it exists and -clearPersistentState is NOT specified in arguments. I think there should be some piece of code somewhere responsible for this but the project is too big I don't know how to track it down. My goal is to make this app to use workbench.xmi once again to restore perspective.
To investigate why this happens I want to know which eclipse method is responsible for perspective restoration so I could make sure that this project at least launches this method. That's the main question.
The less main and the less clear question is how this default restoration behavior can be avoided? I mean where should I look for the possible source of this problem? Could there be some option in some .xml which makes the project forget about workbench.xmi? Could it be some sort of startup handler which manually restores default perspective? Maybe some hint about which methods are possibly should be involved in this so I could search for them. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
-UPDATE-
So it turned out that the problem arises because the project UI is defined in fragments rather than in main Application.e4xmi and eclipse has a bug due to which fragments UI merge with main application after previous state restoration thus replacing restored settings with predefined ones. This bug is discussed in this thread.
This useful article describes how one can manually save and load various application components. Another useful source of inspiration is the source code of ResourceHandler itself.

The main E4Application class controls loading and saving the application model.
E4Application calls a class implementing IModelResourceHandler to load and save the model and the persisted state. It is possible for an application to use its own version of IModelResourceHandler but normally the default org.eclipse.e4.ui.internal.workbench.ResourceHandler is used.
ResourceHandler uses the clearPersistedState, persistState and the deprecated deltaRestore options to control loading the persisted state. These values can be set by command line options.

Add apply="initial" to fragment tag in your plugin.xml to restore stored perspective from workbench.xmi
Example:
<fragment
uri="fragment.e4xmi"
apply="initial">
</fragment>

Related

Placeholders for parts doesn't honor the closeable flag?

I'm running into a strange issue in an application I'm developing using the Eclipse RCP platform.
In my model, I'm attempting to use Shared Elements in order to reuse parts between perspectives. I created a Label part and ensured that the Closeable flag was off.
I created a placeholder for this part and ensured that the same Closeable flag was also off for the placeholder..
However, when I run my RCP application (with persisted state cleared, of course), my part has the close icon on it and can indeed be closed.
On the other hand, if I place the part directly within my part stack as follows,
and leave the Closeable flag off, the part displays correctly without the close icon.
How can I get the placeholders to honor the closeable flag? Or is this the intended behavior...?
This is supposed to work but doesn't. This is reported in Eclipse bug 400771.
This is currently still open. The target for a fix is Eclipse 4.7 but I guess it has missed that as the first release candidate for 4.7 is already available without it.

Is there auto-syncing in netbeans for external changes

I know netbeans syncs the original files once I save, but if there is a file changed externally is there a way for netbeans to recognize this and either tell me to re-sync it or automatically resync it with the new changes?
Here's what makes this behavior possible:
NetBeans 6.9 contains a feature that automatically looks for external changes to keep informations about files up-to-date. We have some reports that it can slow down NetBeans mainly, when an open project has many folders. When NetBeans find out that files were externally changed, it re-scans the files to keep data up-to-date that are used with features like code completion, navigation etc. Unfortunately the notification and following re-scanning can take some time and during this time many mentioned features are waiting for the finishing of scanning. There is option Enable auto-scanning of sources that can switch off this behavior. The option you can find it in Options dialog, Miscellaneous category and Files tab.
The default behavior is that NetBeans also looks for external changes when the main window gets focus. This is can be during developing a web application very often when user switches between browser and IDE. The mentioned option also switch this off.
When you switch off option Enable auto-scanning of sources you can still keep the information up-to-date, just invoke Scan for External Changes action from Sources menu manually.
(Here's the original article by Petr Pisl)
I find it counterproductive to leave this setting on, as sometimes auto-loading external changes to a file opened in the UI without asking for permission first can ruin your day when you're forced to make small local changes that you don't want replicated in your repository. I'm sure other people can think of more reasons to advocate for "warn before loading external changes" behavior to be implemented in NB. That is one of the reasons why I like Eclipse better sometimes.

How do I force Eclipse to rebuild if files in another project change (any change)?

I've got an Eclipse (Galileo) project (called ProguardBuilder) that runs Proguard over a set of class files in other projects and produces a jar file.
I'd like to have the ProguardBuilder project get rebuilt any time any class file in the other projects changes. AutoBuild doesn't do that; presumably it's smart enough to recognize and ignore any changes that don't affect anything externally visible.
My problem is that I don't care whether or not the change is visible, since I need to completely rebuild ProguardBuilder any time the class files it depends on change at all.
How do I tell Eclipse to do this sort of rebuild?
You might have to use an external builder. Check the documentation, because I've never done this. But the place to start is the "Builders" section of the project properties dialogue.

Eclipse: On Save execute a program

I have recently come across the LESS Leaner CSS a template engine for CSS based on ruby. The idea sounded neat, but in practice we need to compile the program to get CSS. This is cumbersome as we make too many changes while working on CSS and for every edit we don't want to compile.
In Eclipse, there are "Save-Actions" but it handles only formatting changes.
Is there a way on saving the file in Eclipse, to call or trigger the compilation?
Its easy to do this in Vi or Emacs.
I think all you need is to define a custom Builder for your project. That way, you can run a program or an ant script whenever certain files change.
Right click on the project -> Properties -> Builders -> New
While the Builders are a good solution, keep in mind they only work when a build is issued - either using auto-build or using a manual build which is invoked, well, manually. If you are looking for something that will operate after a save, regardless of the auto-build state you will need to write a plugin which listens to resource changes in Eclipse.
You do that by creating a workspace change listener and installing it like that:
ResourcesPlugin.getWorkspace().addResourceChangeListener(
..., IResourceChangeEvent.POST_CHANGE);
I'm sure you can take it from here :-)

Is it possible to clear the Netbeans output window from my application or temporarily disable all outputs?

Some background:
I've created a Swing application which uses the Substance LaF (Thanks again, Kirill!)
Unfortunately Swing creates a panel somewhere outside the EDT thus leading to an exception message from Substance every time I start my application. By itself this exception is great, I already saved me from creating nasty multithread GUI bugs, but I often miss important outputs because the output window is already cluttered when my application does any real work.
The easiest way would be to patch the Substance source for my personal needs, but I'd rather leave it untouched. That's why I want to know...
Is it possible to clear the output window programmatically, either by calling a method from my application or something like a delayed Ant task?
Alternatively, can I temporarily disable any outputs from my application, including exceptions messages?
Here you are trying to tweak the default behavior of the Output Window which is a part of the NetBeans IDE. You will need to use the relevant NetBeans APIs. Please take a look at OutputWriter and OutputEvent
HTH.