Extending QuickAccess - Or how to implement my own CTRL+3
15. October 2007
The implementation of the “Ctrl+3″ popup was an undisputed enhancement for more usability. It enables a much faster navigation through all the browsable items you may have in your Workbench. A much more interesting topic is how to adopt this widget in order to be extended, restricted and customized. This is especially usefull for RCP Development to hide and add elements. However, there is currently no way to customize the contents of the quick access popup.
The following article provides instructions for an implementation of a fully customizable popup with the known behaviour. The content is contributed using an extra Extension-Point (no bundle-activation required). (more…)
If you want to write a RCP that makes complex data-structure editable, the TableViewer with a CellEditor might becomes your first choice. It has the advantage to make a direct edit in the ui-component in which it is presented. Especially the ComboBoxCellEditor is the preferred way to select a value from a given list of items. But the use of ComboBoxCellEditors should be kept within a limit. If your application makes excessive use of this CellEditor with a heavy amount of items that can be chosen, CellEditors become a usability-nightmare. The following article describes a way how to use existing concepts in the eclipse sdk to avoid user-frustration and improve the usability of your application at the same time. 
Since Eclipse 3.2 JFace provides a possibility to decorate your Controls. That means you can add small icons and messages to your control to give the user a feedback of the expected input. Especially for applications that are designed for a wide range of end-users with different skills, it’s an elegant way holding the users hand while guiding him through different forms. The additional capability of field-assists makes it very easy to improve the handling of your application. In this article an example is shown how to decorate a text-control and adding a simple filed assist. 
Do you know the palette from GEF?- It is THE Creation Tool for graphical Editors based on GEF. Unfortunately the requirement is often to drag and drop already created objects into the graphical viewer, e.g from a navigation view, or another JFace-Viewer. Therefore you have to implement your own Drag’n Drop mechanism that is also compatible with the EditPart concept and your Commands. Today I want to show you a way how to drag elements from a TableViewer and drop them on my EditParts. Before dropping the elements you have the possibility to hook in your own code for showing an additional wizard/dialog or if you want to manipulate/replace/adapt the dragged model-object. I have written a small manager and that decides when and how a drop is allowed and how to process the dropped data.
Have you ever recognized the complex widgets that are implemented in the IDE plugins?- The most different use cases shipped by plugins like the Compare-Plugin, Team-Plugin, JDT-Plugin are realized with very good looking and also good feeling widgets. So I thought I try to encapsulate such a widget that I can use it in every context. This article gives an overview about a DetailedSectionViewer, which is based on the org.eclipse.ltk.internal.ui.refactoring.history.RefactoringHistoryControl. 
In Eclipse 3.1 there was always the problem that you couldn’t give a sort indicator to a sortable TableViewer. This issue was resolved with Eclipse 3.2. Today I want to show a simple TableViewer with a sorting and indicators, filters and a column reordering. Unfortunately the implementation for the sorters on JFace-Viewers don’t support an ascending or desending flag that takes also care for the indicator-representation. We have to implement this for our own.