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…)

The next release of richhtml4eclipse is available. With 0.3 the following new features were added:

• Foreground-/Background-Color
• Layers (add, move, z-index)
• Non breaking White spaces
• Set HTML programmatically

Check out the latest release on SourceForge.net. Feedback is really appreciated.

Screenshot of the 0.3 Example Toolbar

If you build your own editor in the most cases you have to provide the capability to print its content. In addition you probably also have to print different business-logic that is not presented by an editor or viewpart. SWT gives you the possibility to generate printing jobs, what is a bit complex. With the Open-Source API PaperClips there is a possibility to generate data that can be sent to a printer in a very easy way. In addition it provides cool UI-Elments, e.g. a Print Preview. In this article is explained how to register a Print-Action as GlobalAction Handler, with formatting the data you want to print and a Print-Preview.

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When using a ScrolledComposite, I always had the problem, that I couldn’t use the wheel of my mouse for vertical scrolling. I was really annoyed about it. But now I have found a really simple solution.

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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. (more…)

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.

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Today I want to show how to use of the open-source project SWT-Calendar. With a few lines of code you can implement a wonderful small calendar widget for SWT, that is not delivered by default.

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Probably you was already faced with the requirement to add small icons to your pulldowns. That looks very nice, but unfortunately there is no common SWT-Widget to realize this.
Fortunately the Eclipse-Framework is OpenSource and we can reprodruce the structure of a SWT-ComboBox. A Combo is not more than a text-field and a small button with an arrow. In addition is a event-handler implemented that shows a Composite as a tooltip with the entries of the “combo-list”. We just have to take this class and change the structure of the content. We don’t want to have a org.eclipse.swt.widgets.List, but a org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Table with multiple org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TableItems where you can specify an image. After adjusting the access-methods we have a new cool Widget, that has the same structure and methods like the “built-in”s.

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Today I want to show how to add a sorter to your JFace-Table. The requirement is to sort descending und ascending by clicking on the TableColumn-Header.

JFace already provides sorting-functionality. We just have to provide something like an alogrithm to arrange the items. For that we implemented the CollectionSorter that uses the default Collator from ViewerSorter. (more…)

In complex applications you also have very many images that want to be placed to the right time on the right place.

And because some good software-architects already have concepted the model , in the most cases you want to visualize a special object or a special property of an object with an image in your JFace-List or Tree. Imagine you have 50 JFace-Viewers and 300 different Icons. Do you really want to implement in every LabelProvider how and when to access to which image? I guess, no.

At the following I will provide an easy way to manage image-contribution to your different label-providers. (more…)