Tuesday 17 December 2013

Groovy Script to create a view that shows the images available in the ISharedImages class

Today I needed to add a couple icons to the Eclipse Plugin I'm working on, and after a quick Googling a bit, I found that Eclipse already includes a number of images with its release, namely via its ISharedImages class.

As with the question at Overview of ISharedImages? I wanted to see a full list of images available, and although that answer points to a couple blog posts that have it (see here and here) that didn't answer all my needs, since (for example) I also wanted to know if the images were available in the Eclipse versions we currently support (Indigo, Juno and Kepler).

Since I'm still tweaking the eclipse API (in real-time) and learning how SWT works, this was a good opportunity to do the same thing using a Groovy script.

After a hitting my head against the wall for a bit (trying to control a number of SWT Layouts :)  ), I was finally able to create what I was looking for (see code at the end of this post or at this gist).

Here is the view running in Indigo:


Here is the view running in Kepler:


As you can see the images are the same (in quantity and looks). Note that I remove the *_MASK images, since I am not sure where they are supposed to be used (and they didn't look that good in that view)

Similar to what I did for the .NET version (see Added 215 Tango Library Icons to FluentsSharp.BCL and 'PoC - View FluentSharp_BCL Embeded Icons.h2'), I also added the feature of showing the currently clicked image id in the Selected Image TextBox (helps when looking for a particular image))

To give an idea of how I developed this script, here is the Eclipse instance that contains both the Groovy Script, the created view and an test SWT Designer editor (to help me with SWT's syntax). Note that this is the Eclipse instance that is running in JRebel mode (i.e. I can add new API methods to the Eclipse plugin under test, and consume them immediately)


Here is the groovy code that creates that view, with still with too many SWT plumbing for my taste, and definitely a script that will be dramatically reduced in size once I add the required helper methods to the eclipseUI APIs (like what I did for the code that gets the images from ISharedImages)  :