Teams Winter 2011/team1/RCP/Define and use editors

3. Define and Use Editors

3.1 Editor area

The first step to add editor area to the application is to make the visibility of the editor area in Perspective.java to true .

public class Perspective implements IPerspectiveFactory {

	public void createInitialLayout(IPageLayout layout) {
		
		layout.setEditorAreaVisible(true);   < --

		layout.addView(StudentsView.ID, IPageLayout.LEFT, 1.0f, layout.getEditorArea());
		//make the view fixed
		layout.setFixed(true);
		//make the view non-closeable
		layout.getViewLayout(StudentsView.ID).setCloseable(false);
		
	}
}

3.2 Add input editor IEditorInput serves as the model for the editor and is supposed to be a light-weight representation of the model. For example the Eclipse IDE uses this concept to identify files without handling with the complete file. Based on the equals method the system will determine if the corresponding editor is already open or not therefore you should overwrite the method equals and hashcode in an implementation of IEditor.

Create the new class MyStudentEditorInput which implements IEditorInput.

package cs.ecl.rcp.simplercp.editor;

import org.eclipse.jface.resource.ImageDescriptor;
import org.eclipse.ui.IEditorInput;
import org.eclipse.ui.IPersistableElement;

public class MyStudentEditorInput implements IEditorInput {
        private final String id;

        public MyStudentEditorInput(String id) {
                this.id = id;
        }

        public String getId() {
                return id;
        }

	@Override
	public Object getAdapter(Class adapter) {
		return null;
	}

	@Override
	public boolean exists() {
        return true;
	}

	@Override
	public ImageDescriptor getImageDescriptor() {
		return null;
	}

	@Override
	public String getName() {
        return String.valueOf(id);
	}

	@Override
	public IPersistableElement getPersistable() {
		return null;
	}

	@Override
	public String getToolTipText() {
		return "Displays a student";
	}
}

3.3 Adding the editor

Now we should add the editor to our extensions.
Go to plugin.xml and select the tab extensions. Add the extension org.eclipse.ui.editors.

In ID, type in cs.ecl.rcp.smiplercp.studentEditor.
In class, enter cs.ecl.rcp.simplercp.MyStudentEditor.