08.17.07

robobait: difficulties setting up Eclipse for plug-in development

Posted in Eclipse, Hacking, robobait at 10:40 am by ducky

It took me way longer than it should have to get setup for my current project. I need to change some very fundamental behaviours of Eclipse. There is a plugin that does 80% of what I want, so I need to modify it.

I checked the plugin out of Eclipse’s CVS, but I couldn’t get at the Eclipse source (e.g. when I tried to do F3 or control-click on a class or method). I tried downloading the entire Eclipse source, but

  • I got tons of errors because the projects weren’t set up right to refer to each other, and setting them up by hand would have been a nightmare.
  • Everything got dog-slow.

SOLUTION

It turns out that I needed to first download the plugin from CVS, then convert it to a plug-in project. (Right-click on the project, then select PDE Tools, then select Convert Projects to Plug-in Projects.)

That gave me access to a lot of source, but not all of what I needed. To get other source, I needed to do

File -> Import -> Plugin&Fragments -> Project with source folder

then select the packages that I wanted the source for, Add, and then Finish.

Keywords: eclipse development, all eclipse source, attach source eclipse

Comments

  1. bsd said,

    August 20, 2007 at 10:01 am

    There is a slightly simpler way to enable F3-style navigation support by adding the plugins to the Java search. Open the “Plug-ins” view, select the plugins you’re interested in, and then right click and choose “Add to Java search.” This will cause the plugins to be indexed for the Java search index.

    This method is no more intuitive than importing the projects though.