Eclipse Tips – Some useful static access for PDE/RCP developper

Did you ever be amazed when discovering a static method that provides you exactly the feature that you need?

Did you ever be amazed when discovering a static method that provides you exactly the feature that you need?

No later than this week, I was (again)  amazed by such a killer feature. It was just when I want to open the log file in an editor. With 4 classes, it was done!!

So, I will share with you these classes and some of my beloved static methods also provides by them.

• PlatformUI : the one that I used the most…
  - access to the Workbench and so easy access to all parts of your application (and get the active ones),
  - the PreferenceStore where you can set some preferences of the user,
  - and can also create Display to… display ^^ a new window
• Platform : we can found a lot of things, I advice you take a look.
  - provides a lot of OS related information,
  - access to the ExtensionRegistry (all extensions declared… and providing to your extension points ),
  - the log file location,
  - … and many other things!!
• EFS (which stands for Eclipse File System) : Introduce in 3.2, I think that it is an underrated  class and that it provides a good API to manipulate files.
  - static access to files giving it URI, IPath, File…
  - and then manipulating easily via the interface IFileStore which is returned
• IDE : A lot of convenience method to open file in editor
  - convenience method to open file from inside and outside of the workspace
  - convenience method to open file designed by URI, IPath, IFile,…
  - convenience method to open a file at a specified Marker
  - … and some other options

I let you discover all the possibilities… and share your beloved ones!!