I want create a installer by using Eclipse RCP. I need to give the user a wizard-like installer. This means user can do some options then click next. Or they can go back to previous page by click previous. Or they can cancel the installation by clicking cancel.
Here is my problem:
I don't know how to switch between views when clicking "next","previous". I need to create something like WizardPages and i can change between these pages?
I can't use JFace wizard because I'm required not to pop up any dialog.
I'm totally new to Eclipse RCP so please help!
thanks.
Maybe "StackLayout" is what you need.
Consider whether you actually want/need Eclipse RCP in this context. Eclipse RCP shines in complex applications with an extensive business domain and complex user interface.
An installer wizard, however, is very straightforward and static. I cannot imagine you requiring more than two or three user inputs. Your question is a bit like "I want to hear beautiful music. How do I program a robot to play the piano?"
It is much easier to limit yourself to using SWT and JFace. Use the JFace WizardDialog to make a nice installation wizard. You will find you will have never needed the Eclipse RCP framework.
See http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipseWizards/article.html for a nice tutorial.
If you do think you need the features of the Eclipse RCP runtime framework, I suggest you follow the path below instead:
Create an RCP application (e.g. the sample 'Mail' application). A class will be created that is the main entry point in your application. This class will launch the Eclipse Workbench. Delete this code, and instead launch the WizardDialog.
A lot of things will not be available, such as menu's, views with drag-and-drop functionality, keybindings, etc. I cannot imagine you will need those things. However, you will benefit from the following Eclipse RCP features:
Eclipse launch framework. Ability to create a self-contained product including the JRE.
OSGi framework. Ability to easily add new plugins. Ability to use services, blueprint, etc.
JFace framework.
EMF (if you have a very complicated installation wizard)
All other eclipse plugins, although a lot of them may not work outside of the context of the Eclipse Workbench.
If you are convinced you need the full Eclipse Workbench, you can always do the following:
Define a 'base' perspective that is 'locked down'.
Use a Command to move from one perspective to the other. This will allow you to keep the previous wizard views open in other (hidden) perspectives.
Use Eclipse Contexts to hide all the standard Eclipse Workbench functionality, menu's, etc.
Since you are new to Eclipse RCP, I do not recommend learning the framework in the particular usecase of an Installation Wizard. You already need good knowledge of Eclipse RCP to be able to hack it this way, and it will not be a clean or nice implementation :-)
Related
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 downloaded Netbeans 7.1 with all bundle from http://netbeans.org/downloads and installed it successfully on Windows 7.
But I can't find Java Desktop Application which should be under Java category when add new project as 7.0 does.
Where is it? Or what is the substitute one in 7.1? I need something to create GUI by dragging components.
Thanks.
Look here: http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204661
Support for [B]SAF (JSR 296, basically the framework that was behind your "Java Desktop Application" project template) has been abruptly dropped (for no valid reason, let me add).
However, as Bill says in his answer, it is not necessary to use the SAF in order to visually design a form. NetBeans swing-designer (known as Matisse) can be used to design any JFrame, JDialog, JPanel, etc.
You just have to
Right click -> New -> JFrame Form...
and you're ready to drag-and-drop!
(The features you'll be missing are the extra bells and whistles that such framework provided, like SAF Actions, windowing persistence, simplified management for long running Tasks and related visual feedback [now you have to get your hands dirty with the SwingWorker class], etc)
Java Desktop refers to an effort to create a standard or library (libraries) that never really produced anything of significance. I think its likely that they finally removed it from Netbeans.
Its easier to just create a new Java Application project, don't bother with a main, then create a new JFrame Form. That class will have a main for you to use, and you can also design the frame in the form. You can also create JPanel Form classes. Note: you can do this in just about any project in netbeans, there is nothing special about the projects for them.
its better to use NetBeans 7.0 for full support of swing components.
many tutorials and guides feature the "Java Desktop Application" (like the ones for JXMapKit : http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/10/30/building-maps-into-swing-app-with-jxmapviewer.html )
You can find something helpful to create CRUD desktop application in Java.
You can find it here.
I have a very basic RCP application (e3.7.1) with only one (Hello World) plugin. For reasons of code control I want to develop all perspectives and views in separate plugins. I have now set up one plugin with a perspective and a view. How do I get them into my main RCP plugin, e.g., where do I configure which extensions/extension points? I want the perspective and view to appear in the Perspective Menu as well.
How did you create you RCP application, did you create a .product definition ? did you create a feature ?
Basically Eclipse is based around plugins (OSGI bundles) and you can create view and perspective in different plugins. As long as your plugin is part of you RCP .product definition either as a plain plugin or into a feature definition, you should be able to export your RCP application with all the desired plugins.
If you are just talking about how to run them from Eclipse, you need to edit the run configuration and add all the plugin you need to activate in the Eclipse Application run configuration. This configuration is the on you use to launch the RCP application.
The set of view and perspective shortcuts in those menus is specific to current perspective.
If the perspective on which you want to make those shortcuts available is your own, then you need to call IPageLayout methods addShowViewShortcut() and addPerspectiveShortcut() from your IPerspectiveFactory. If you want to make those shortcuts available on someone else's perspective then use org.eclipse.ui.perspectiveExtensions extension point.
I'm developing an Eclipse RCP based application, that uses the resource model of eclipse (workspace, projects, resources, etc.). For basic usage of the resource concept, there is no need to depend on the IDE plug-in. But many dialogs, wizards or views I want to use are inside this plug-in. I read about not to have any dependencies on IDE plug-ins in an RCP app.
For example, I want to implement a new project wizard and use the common look and functionality of the existing ones by overriding org.eclipse.ui.dialogs.WizardNewProjectCreationPage and using org.eclipse.ui.wizards.newresource.BasicNewProjectResourceWizard - both inside the IDE plug-in.
Are there any caveats using org.eclipse.ui.ide plug-in in an RCP app?
If so, what is your best practice to not reinvent the wheel?
As you can see with this thread (or that one), since eclipse3.3, most the the components of org.eclipse.ui.ide have been isolated in their own plugin.
So it can be a good practice to include what you need from that package, the only problem being to include to much contributions.
This thread gives a hint as how to remove some of them.
You can, for example, disable export and import wizards.
Both of those examples are based on Activity filtering
An activity is a logical grouping of function that is centered around a certain kind of task.
For example, developing Java software is an activity commonly performed by users of the platform, and the JDT defines many UI contributions (views, editors, perspectives, preferences, etc.) that are only useful when performing this activity.
Activities can be used to implement progressive disclosure of UI elements; when used for this purpose, they are called capabilities in the UI.
The second use for activities, added for Eclipse 3.4, is to filter available UI elements based on other criteria such as the current user's access permissions as defined by the application.
This article "Eclipse Activities – Hide / Display certain UI elements" by Lars Vogel in his "papercut series" gives a good illustration of hiding / displaying certain UI elements.
I want to use the "Web Tools Editor" that is part of the Web Tools Plattform in my own RCP-Application. I think i have got some understanding on the RCP plattform by now, but I still have no clue how to access the functionality of the pagedesigner (org.eclipse.jst.pagedesigner) after adding it as a dependency to my project. Has anyone some experience in adding components of the web tools plattform into an RCP-Application and can give me a hint or something?
There's a difficulty with these sorts of requests (I am, myself, trying to include this or that feature that I saw in the Eclipse IDE, every so often).
The trick is to try and identify the component you want to bring in, and then try and pull it into your project, without bringing in too many dependencies.
The first step used to be quite hard, but since 3.4 it is a matter of using the Plug-In Spy - hold down Alt-Shift-F1 on whilst your desired component is in focus should give you a tooltip showing you the class, the bundle, etc etc.
The second step is altogether more tricky and is where I usuaully fail to get any results:
if you are lucky then you can just include the bundle in the launch configuration/.product of your app. Once you hit Add Required Bundles, you are not left with 3000 bundles (i.e. your RCP is now Eclipse).
usually, this is not the case, because the Eclipse team haven't refactored the bit of code you're interested in out into an RCP safe bundle. If so, then you're going to have to do that yourself.
Again, if you are lucky then that will mean moving some classes out of the eclipse bundle into your own, including internal classes, and that will be the end of it - i.e. the dependencies of your desired functionality are all within the bundle.
If you're unlucky, then you need to isolate/reimplement the bit of functionality that is required, and change your version of the copied code.
It is hard laborious, and pretty difficult to upgrade. I realise that none of this is what you want to hear.