Recipe 12.6 Writing a Plug-in from a Skeleton

     

12.6.1 Problem

You want to develop the code for a plug-in yourself, from scratch.

12.6.2 Solution

You can create a skeletal plug-in project in the Plug-in Code Generators pane by selecting Default Plug-In Structure. We'll do that here and develop the rest of the plug-in from that starting point.

12.6.3 Discussion

As an example, we'll create the plug-in created earlier in this chapter that displayed menus , but this time, we'll do the work ourselves instead of relying entirely on a wizard. We will use a wizard to get started, however, so select File New Project. In the New Project dialog, select Plug-in Development in the left box and Plug-in Project in the right box, and click Next. In the next pane, enter the new project's name , org.cookbook.ch12.MenuPlugInFromScratch , and click Next to open the Plug-in Project Structure pane. Click Next again to accept the defaults.

In the Plug-in Code Generators pane, select Default Plug-In Structure, as shown in Figure 12-13, and click Next.

Figure 12-13. Selecting a plug-in wizard
figs/ecb_1213.gif

The next dialog enables you to set the provider name, which we'll set to Eclipse Cookbook . Because we'll be writing our own code here, uncheck the items in the "Plug-in code generation options" box, as shown in Figure 12-14, and click Finish.

Figure 12-14. Setting the provider name
figs/ecb_1214.gif

Clicking Finish creates the MenuPlugInFromSratch plug-in, opening its manifest in Eclipse. Click the Source tab, which displays the XML in plugin.xml . That XML should look like this:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <plugin    id="org.cookbook.ch12.MenuPlugInFromScratch"    name="MenuPlugInFromScratch Plug-in"    version="1.0.0"    provider-name="Eclipse Cookbook"    class="org.cookbook.ch12.MenuPlugInFromScratch.MenuPlugInFromScratchPlugin">    <runtime>       <library name="MenuPlugInFromScratch.jar"/>    </runtime>    <requires>       <import plugin="org.eclipse.core.resources"/>       <import plugin="org.eclipse.ui"/>    </requires> </plugin> 

That's our new plug-in's manifest. Our goal in this plug-in is to add a new menu item and a button in the toolbar. To make things happen in a plug-in, you define actions and action sets . See the following recipe for further details.

12.6.4 See Also

Recipe 12.2 on creating plugin.xml ; Recipe 12.9 on creating an action set; Recipe 12.10 on coding an Eclipse action; Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 in Eclipse ( O'Reilly).



Eclipse Cookbook
Inside XML (Inside (New Riders))
ISBN: 596007108
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 232
Authors: Steve Holzner

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