Thursday, October 12, 2006
Safer ways to parent your Shells
I have recently seen a fair amount of code where people are creating Dialogs parented off of the active shell using
There are a lot of shells in Eclipse. Beyond the obvious ones (the Workbench Window and any modal Dialogs you have open) you can have a Shell to animate trim, a Shell to show a tool tip, a Shell for content assist and so on. If one of these is the active shell you could parent your Shell off of all sorts of things.
To be safe try and use a Shell that you are aware of - i.e. if you are creating something off of another Dialog use the Shell of that Dialog. Of course this doesn't help you for your first Dialog which should use the Workbench Window as a parent.
If you look at ProgressManagerUtil#getNonModalShell() you can see how we do it for the Progress manager.
you still need to handle the null case but it is not particularly common that you have no Workbench windows.
To be even safer in 3.1
This is really handy if you want to delay opening the dialog for some reason or are concerned about the shell you have selected closing on you.
Display#getActiveShell().There are a lot of shells in Eclipse. Beyond the obvious ones (the Workbench Window and any modal Dialogs you have open) you can have a Shell to animate trim, a Shell to show a tool tip, a Shell for content assist and so on. If one of these is the active shell you could parent your Shell off of all sorts of things.
To be safe try and use a Shell that you are aware of - i.e. if you are creating something off of another Dialog use the Shell of that Dialog. Of course this doesn't help you for your first Dialog which should use the Workbench Window as a parent.
If you look at ProgressManagerUtil#getNonModalShell() you can see how we do it for the Progress manager.
IWorkbenchWindow window =
PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getActiveWorkbenchWindow();
if (window == null) {
IWorkbenchWindow[] windows = PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getWorkbenchWindows();
if (windows.length > 0)
return windows[0].getShell();
} else
return window.getShell();
return null;
you still need to handle the null case but it is not particularly common that you have no Workbench windows.
To be even safer in 3.1
org.eclipse.jface.ShellProvider was implemented. This can be used to parent any window and allows you to choose the Shell when the dialog is about to be created rather than when you create the instance.This is really handy if you want to delay opening the dialog for some reason or are concerned about the shell you have selected closing on you.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Widget tickling in JFace
Some of you may have noticed that in M2 we have refactored the way refreshing happens in Table and Tree Viewers so that if you want to access the widget during a refresh you can now. This is really useful for things like using the new SWT owner draw support but also eliminates the need for the plethora of color,font, text and image providers we used to use.
We of course support your old code but if you want to check out our new streamlined code have a look at
Special thanks to Tom Schindl and Boris (our UI API Polizei) for all of his help hammering the new API out.
We of course support your old code but if you want to check out our new streamlined code have a look at
org.eclipse.jface.viewers.CellLabelProvider#update(ViewerCell cell).Special thanks to Tom Schindl and Boris (our UI API Polizei) for all of his help hammering the new API out.
