Customizing the UI in small RCP Projects
16. April 2007
The presentation framework provided by Eclipse gives you the possibility to customize the UI and the behavior of graphical elements. A good example for UI-customization is the Lotus Nodes Client “Hannover”. But what do you do If you don’t have the budget, time or the skill set to implement such an excessive UI-customization like the guys from “Hannover”? Especially for small RCP applications with a handful views and the wish that your product should not look like a “typical Eclipse Client” it is probably better to use alternative possibilities to create an individual looking RCP. The following article will give an example how to customize your UI easily without using any special framework or extension-point. (more…)
If you want to write a RCP that makes complex data-structure editable, the TableViewer with a CellEditor might becomes your first choice. It has the advantage to make a direct edit in the ui-component in which it is presented. Especially the ComboBoxCellEditor is the preferred way to select a value from a given list of items. But the use of ComboBoxCellEditors should be kept within a limit. If your application makes excessive use of this CellEditor with a heavy amount of items that can be chosen, CellEditors become a usability-nightmare. The following article describes a way how to use existing concepts in the eclipse sdk to avoid user-frustration and improve the usability of your application at the same time. 
Since Eclipse 3.2 JFace provides a possibility to decorate your Controls. That means you can add small icons and messages to your control to give the user a feedback of the expected input. Especially for applications that are designed for a wide range of end-users with different skills, it’s an elegant way holding the users hand while guiding him through different forms. The additional capability of field-assists makes it very easy to improve the handling of your application. In this article an example is shown how to decorate a text-control and adding a simple filed assist. 
Mylar 1.0 was released. Reason enough to checkout the plugin and test the functionalities. The Project is a task focused extension for coupling tasks with units of work or resources in your Eclipse IDE. The main goal of Mylar is to associate your work with tasks from a task repository and the monitoring of your work. Dependend from your activity mylar tries to focus ui elements that are responsible for you and hides all the things that are not important for resolving the current task.
If you build your own editor in the most cases you have to provide the capability to print its content. In addition you probably also have to print different business-logic that is not presented by an editor or viewpart. SWT gives you the possibility to generate printing jobs, what is a bit complex. With the Open-Source API 
Eclipse BIRT is a reporting API and designer for “rapid reporting creation” 
. In nearly every application you have the requirement to generate different reports in different output formats. A colleague was faced with that requirement on a J2EE Application and we decided to try BIRT to see if it’s already in a state where you can use it on “real” projects. In the following I want to share my experience with BIRT in that project.
The loosely coupling of different application components is one of the most characteristic feature of Eclipse that should also be used by a RCP-developer. Especially because of the interfaces that are defined in eclipse with the extension-framework, you’re able to deliver products that are flexible and easy to customize. Therefore Eclipse gives you all needed tools and formalism to take with them.
Do you know the palette from GEF?- It is THE Creation Tool for graphical Editors based on GEF. Unfortunately the requirement is often to drag and drop already created objects into the graphical viewer, e.g from a navigation view, or another JFace-Viewer. Therefore you have to implement your own Drag’n Drop mechanism that is also compatible with the EditPart concept and your Commands. Today I want to show you a way how to drag elements from a TableViewer and drop them on my EditParts. Before dropping the elements you have the possibility to hook in your own code for showing an additional wizard/dialog or if you want to manipulate/replace/adapt the dragged model-object. I have written a small manager and that decides when and how a drop is allowed and how to process the dropped data.
