Recipe 13.4 Creating a Plug-in That Supports Views

13.4.1 Problem

You need your plug-in to support a view.

13.4.2 Solution

Use the PDE template "Plug-in with a view."

13.4.3 Discussion

This next example will build a plug-in that supports a view—in this case, a clickable tree of items. To follow along, create a new plug-in project named org.cookbook.ch13.ViewPlugIn. In the Plug-in Code Generators dialog, shown in Figure 13-9, select "Plug-in with a view" and click Next.

Figure 13-9. Configuring a plug-in with a view

In the next dialog, set the provider name to Eclipse Cookbook, as shown in Figure 13-10.

Figure 13-10. Setting the provider name

Clicking Next brings up the Main View Settings dialog shown in Figure 13-11. Here's where you customize the view, setting its name, as well as a whether it should be a tree-based view or a table-based view. Name the view Item View, and make it a tree-based view, as shown in the figure. Click Next again to bring up the final dialog of this wizard.

Figure 13-11. Setting view options

In the last dialog, you configure the view's actions. Leave the defaults selected, and click Finish to create the template for this plug-in (see Figure 13-12).

Figure 13-12. Configuring the view's actions

After you click Finish, the template for this plug-in is created, and these files are created and added to the project's src folder:

org.cookbook.ch13.ViewPlugIn
|
|_  _  _build.properties                          Controls the build script
|
|_  _  _plugin.xml                                Plug-in manifest
|
|_  _  _src                                       Source folder
    |
    |_  _org.cookbook.ch13.ViewPlugIn 
    |   |_  _ViewPlugInPlugin.java              Plug-in's Java file
    |
    |_  _org.cookbook.ch13.ViewPlugIn.views
        |_  _SampleView.java                    View's code

To customize this new plug-in by adding items to the view and making them do something, see the next two recipes.

13.4.4 See Also

Recipe 13.5 on adding items to a view; Recipe 13.6 on configuring the actions in a view; Chapter 12 of Eclipse (O'Reilly).