I have an Eclipse-RCP project with multiple product_configuration.product files.
They are sort of siblings; product-B has all product-A's dependencies but have different launching/configuration.
The problem comes when I add a new plug-in to product-A (which I launch the most often), and then forgot to add the plug-in to product B,C,D etc.
It stays hidden until I actually launch/export the other configuration; only then I see it's missing and it's a bit painful.
Is there any way to solve this without manually adding plug-in dependencies into each product?
You could use a Feature based configuration rather than just plugins. Then you can have one or more common features used by all of the products and other features containing the plugins unique to each product.
Some more on features here
Related
I have an Eclipse-based OSGi application consisting of bundles organised in features. I use a product definition to launch the application. In this definition, I can also set start-levels for my bundles.
Now imagine I want to add a feature to the running application. Is a p2.inf file the only way to specify start levels for the bundles in this feature? Re-defining and re-starting the product does not sound like an optimal solution as it's not really dynamic.
I am not aware of any real tooling support for setting start levels for bundles on the feature level. The only option you have is manual hacking with a p2.inf.
I think the reason that setting start levels is only really supported for products is that p2 can't handle the case where start levels are specified multiple times. This could easily happen if setting start levels on feature level was encouraged.
So, you can make this work on feature level, but only if you know what you do.
I have the same problem I believe: I have a feature that is both part of a packaged product and present on an update site to be installed into an Eclipse IDE. And I also want to set the start-level for some of the plug-ins to ensure a very early start-up.
I have overcome this with a p2.inf file with the following content:
instructions.configure=setStartLevel(startLevel:1);markStarted(started: true);
instructions.unconfigure=setStartLevel(startLevel:-1);markStarted(started: false);
(I don't think I need to specify the start-level in the product definition anymore though I have not tried to remove this yet.)
I originally used start-level 2, but at least for Juno packages, there are some plug-ins that are started at level 1 so I now use level 1 as well.
I already have a standalone Eclipse RCP application. The next task is to integrate the plugins which are widely used in the Eclipse community like CDT or say PyDev to provide the editing and debugging facilities in respective programming languages inside the already developed RCP app. Just wondering how do i go about accomplishing this task. Should i start with playing around the extension points of the plugins and adding it to the MANIFEST.MF ?
What are the various ways of achieving this ? Which one to pick over the other?
The most important thing you should consider (besides the technical) is a conceptional.
Plugins like CDT are making a lot of assumptations about their environment they are integrated into. That means your RCP should have a very similar user-interface and behavior like the normal Eclipse SDK so that the integration of other "IDE-ish" plugins is not a break of the interface principles of your RCP.
If your RCP is not based on a common navigator, projects, files (in general the Workspace) and several editors the integration of Plugins like CDT will be a nightmare for your users and will feel like another application within your RCP.
Make also sure that ui-contributions from third-party-plugins are visible (e.g. if the third-party-plugin is contributing a preference page, make sure that your RCP has the menu-item to open the preference-window)
First you have to load the new features/plugins in your existing RCP application. For this you have to adapt your product definition and load the new feature.xml files. or you enhance your own feature.xml and place the new plugins into.
Afterwards you have to decide, whether the new functions/view/perspectives are contributions to an already existing RCP extension point and whether you use this extension point in your RCP product.
If you want to use the new functions in another way (because the default is not enough) you have to point to specific views/actions in the new plugins and call them by your self. Fot his you have to adapt the MANIFEST.MF of your own plugin and point to the new plugins. If you do it, you can not switch off the added features, because you do have a jard link to these plugins.
Your RCP product already depends on the RCP feature (org.eclipse.rcp) or a subset of its plug-ins. This means, it already includes the plug-ins defining the basic extension points.
To include functionality (extensions) from additional features, just add these features to your product configuration dependencies. For example, you would have to add the feature org.eclipse.cdt for CDT and org.python.pydev.feature for PyDev.
The hard part begins when you need to include only some of the features' plug-ins.
You'll have to isolate the plug-in(s) providing the functionality you require.
For UI contributions, you can use the plug-in selection spy by selecting the required UI part and clicking alt+shift+F1.
For non-UI contributions, information for contributed extensions can be found in the plugin.xml files in the plug-in sources.
These plug-ins, along with their dependencies can be added to a custom feature, which can be included in your product.
Although dated, the article Building a CDT-based editor might also be of help.
I have a set of plug-ins which need to support different Eclipse products. There is a core plug-in, which is product-independent, and an adaptation plug-in each for Product X, Product Y, etc.
Deployment-wise, I'm thinking one feature for the core plug-in and one for each product, containing the adaptation plug-in and having a dependency to the core feature, so the core plug-in gets installed without the user having to select it.
1) Is there a better way of structuring the features?
On the development side, I would like to be able to work with both the core and adaptation plug-ins within the same workspace, which as I understand it gives me two main options: a) working within each product using their respective installations as target platforms, or b) working in raw Eclipse with an explicitly defined target platform for each product.
2) What would be the best way to set up the development environment?
If option a), can I use the same workspace for different products or would I need to set up separate workspaces? In other words, are different Eclipse products able to share a workspace as long as they're all based on the same (say) major version, eg 3.x?
If option b), can Eclipse manage multiple simultaneous target platforms? In other words, can different plug-in projects within the same workspace be compiled against different target platforms during the same build? And if not, how could I automate switching between them so I wouldn't have to do that manually during a workspace build?
Or indeed, am I missing something fundamental and is there a much better way of doing all this?
The short answer is you can do it either way.
You can have 1 workspace per product, and each workspace has the target platform of that product. At the moment, eclipse supports one target platform active per workspace, not per project though.
Or you can have eclipse and the 3rd party plugins you need as your target platform, and simply work on all 3 products and the common plugin in one workspace. If your total source plugins is <20, this would probably be fine. For >20, eclipse supports Working Set which would hide the plugin you are not working on at the moment.
Working Eclipse features and plugins, I have a problem with building two separate features (lets call them One and Two) where Two contains plugins that depend on plugins in One. I use PDE Build and ideally would like to have the option to build just One or Two (assuming One was built at some previous point in time).
However, having built One and then trying to build Two I run into the problem that classes that were built in One cannot be resolved. I am trying to get the second build to use the .jar files which were the output of building One, but have had no success. It simply seems it ignores the build output from One.
I've tried various solutions, like using build.properties pluginPath property to refer to the .jar files I depend on. Copying the already built plugins into buildDirectory is not a good option either, since the environment I am working in is a bit messed up and the build directory also contains other plugins that are not to be built (including the plugins built with One).
Any suggestions are welcome!
Cheers,
Anders
In PDE, features are just sets of plugins. This is meaningful during installation but not during build. So you can't say "plugin X depends on feature Y", you can only say "plugin X depends on plugin Z"
So what you need to do is this:
Add dependencies to the plugins in Two which mention the plugins from One
Add One to the "target platform definition". This is basically a list of plugins which will be available when the plugins of Two will be installed at some time in the future.
This blog post should get you started how to create your own target platform.
[EDIT] These two blog posts might also be useful:
http://pweclipse.blogspot.com/2011/02/pde-build-as-workspace-export.html
http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipsePDEBuild/article.html
In the context of an RCP application I am wondering if I should base my product on plugins or on features.
The main difference I can see for now is about the content of the exported application.
Using plugins as product base result in an exported (with GUi or headless build, it's the same) with ALL the required plugins (computed I guess through plugins manifest).
On the opposite, when using feature as bases the exported product only contain the listed features in the product file. Thus I have to add manually add all the required features in order to let my product work correctly. This also has the side effect to bring all the features plugins even if they are not needed.
What are your experiences on the subject ?
EDIT As suggested by Vonc comments I created my own feature including only plugins I need from other features. This solution works but I have to manually add all the required plugins by my product in this feature. Today to do that, the only solution I found is to use the launch configuration plugins tabb with the compute required plugins button and to report by hand in my feature all the selected plugins. It's really boring :-( Is there any other solutions existing ?
Thanks
After many investigations here is a "clear" (I hope) status on the subject.
Plugin Products:
No problem when building (Gui or headless) => all the required (the same than the required plugins computed in the launch configuration dialog when debugging the app) plugins are present
The RCP application disk footprint is optimized !! No useless plugins
No features are exported: as a ressult the features list tab of about dialog is empty !!!
It seems that plugin products are not recommended for RCP with self update (I didnd't tested that yet)
Feature Products:
When exporting (headless), the only present plugins and features are the one listed in the .product file
Need to create a "dependencies" features including all the required plugins OR depend on all the features containing the required plugins => bring a lot of useless plugins
Features listed in the about dialog
In my personal situation, I decided to use a Feature Product and then to "manually" create a feature including all the 90 plugins required by my RCP.
Because I am lazy and hate repetitive tasks, I wrote a simple Java main parsing a launch configuration file (.launch located in the workspace metadata folder) and generating from a template the feature with all the required dependencies.
Hope this can help others, and if you need my simple Java feature dependency creator, just ask it.
Manu