I have an RCP application that uses p2 and needs to run on all of our platforms (this uses 3.4.2).  Everything was great until Vista came along.  On Vista when going to the Software Updates… dialog it gets the “not properly configured” dialog and won’t let me do the fun p2 stuff.

The problem is that Vista does not like it (sort of) if you try to write things in the Program Files directory.  You can write as much as you like only during the install process, and there seems to be some way that it writes a “virtual store” into this area when the app is running, but p2 will not work with this.

The solution that I have found is to (my app is called “osdt”, which is also the name of my launcher executable):

1. Add
   • -Dosgi.configuration.area=@user.home/osdt/configuration

   to my Launching Arguments in my product file in the VM Arguments section for all platforms.  This tells it to look for the configuration area in a location that’s relative to the Java “user.home” system property (c:/Users/<User name> on Vista and c:/Documents and Settings/<User name> on XP.)

2. Add the following into my config.ini file:
   • eclipse.p2.data.area=@config.dir/../p2
   • osgi.instance.area=@user.home/osdt/workspace

This makes sure that the p2 data area is relative to the configuration and my workspace is also created relative to the user’s home directory.

3. Teach my installer to put the configuration and p2 directories in the expected location. I use install4j - and the key here is to have it come up with the variable setting the location to install these things at install time using the “user.home” system property from Java so that the Eclipse @user.home and where the kit is being installed to will always be in sync.

All of this was great, but it did not work, and I was finding that no matter what I did to my osdt.ini file it had no effect. The problem was that the Vista “virtual store” mechanism had written my information from the previous installs and that was silently overriding what was in the Program Files folder. In general, if you write something to the Program Files folder, it will really be written to c:/Users/<User name>/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/Program Files, and whatever is at this virtual store location will silently take precedence over what is in the Program Files folder. Once I deleted the stuff in the virtual store location everything was fine.

Just spent a couple of hours debugging one of these and thought I would write it up in hopes that it makes things better.

My use case is that I’m calling my application from an API which means I’m dynamically starting it using the EclipseStarter class (with reflection since I can’t reference Eclipse stuff from the JAR file that my customers use).

Everything used to work in this particular set of tests (don’t they all say that?), and then when I run them I get the error below.

It turns out the problem was the plugin (bundle) that contained the application definition (in the plugin.xml) did not get resolved.  It did not get resolved because it depended on a plugin that did not exist.  However there is nothing in the logs that indicated there was a problem loading this plugin, it was just silently not loaded.  I only discovered this debugging the bundle resolution code and wondering why it was not resolved.

So if you get this error and you can’t think of any other reason for it, make sure all of your dependent bundles are present, and ;resoution=optional could be your friend.

This bug has been filed about this: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=277058 (this happened in 3.4.2, so maybe it’s fixed in 3.5).

Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Application “com.oaklandsw.transform.runtime.engine” could not be found in the registry. The applications available are: org.eclipse.equinox.app.error, org.eclipse.update.core.standaloneUpdate, org.eclipse.updat
e.core.siteOptimizer.
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppContainer.startDefaultApp(EclipseAppContainer.java:242)
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.MainApplicationLauncher.run(MainApplicationLauncher.java:29)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:386)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585)
at com.oaklandsw.transform.runtime.RuntimeFactory.createRuntime(RuntimeFactory.java:229)
… 76 more

As of N20090304-2000 (and 3.5M6) the CNF incompatibilities with prior released have been fixed, and what’s even better is the mechanism is cleaner and simpler to explain.

bug 255793

bug 252293

I won’t elaborate right now for personal reasons (broken elbow), but the docs will be updated (thanks to help from  my lovely wife) and I will explain all in the docs and at EclipseCon.

I was looking at this:

/*
* Non-Javadoc. Method declared on Viewer.
*/
public void refresh() {
refresh(getRoot());
}

I hit F3 when Viewer was selected and it took me there.  It appeared to do it because it matched the name of a class.  Hitting F3 on Method also worked.  Pretty cool!

I was just talking with my wife and told her that I only had a couple of more sets of warnings to go:

her: “What are you talking about?”

me: “In the Common Navigator.”

her: “You don’t have warnings, that must have been what you inherited.”

me: “Yes, there are about 6300 warnings in Platform UI/JDT code right now.  (expletive deleted)”

I’m doing my part.

I have no outstanding bugs or enhancement requests related to DnD.

Thanks to Dani Megert for helping me with many of the issues.

Now it’s onto issues of priority and categorization for actions and sorting.  And a few other things.

Someone asked which bugs/enhancements I plan to address.

I plan to address all of them (that are known to me — if I missed any, let me know).  The ones that are currently marked for M6 have a fix waiting review, I will get to the rest in the next day or two.

In the next few days I intend to address as many of the CNF drag and drop defects as possible.  I have marked them all with “dnd” in the status whiteboard (search for Platform/UI/CommonNavigator).  The way I work is to work on one area of code at a time to really learn it and to try and address all of the issues with it before moving on to the next area.  So if you have any DnD issues, other bugs, questions, etc, now is the time.

With the M5 changes to the Common Navigator (are you sick about hearing about this yet?), the caching of the association between objects added by the content provider and the the navigator content extension has been temporarily removed.  The reason for this is to make sure the behaviour of finding the correct navigator content extension for a given object is always the same (previously it was not, depending on the state of the cache).

As bug 262675 has revealed, it was possible to have an object in the cache associated with a navigator content extension, even though that object did not match an expression defined by that extension.  This is because all objects provides by the content provider were blindly added to the cache.  Since the cache has been removed, it has revealed cases where the navigator content extensions were not setup correctly to account for all of the possible objects (one of these was missing in the case of the above DTP bugs).  This will require a simple change to fix (look at the patch associated with the bug report).

It is possible that this problem may show up with other users of the CNF.  The problem has always been there, it was just very non-deterministic and hard to reproduce given the cache.  Now these problems with show up quickly so they can be fixed.  I will also be done some work for M5 (tomorrow) to make the error handling of these cases work well.

There are changes to the way the Common Navigator selects content extensions for label providers that might be incompatible with existing implementations.  These are in bug 252293 and are available in any I build after I20090125-2000.  So far so good.  I have tested these with JDT, CDT, and the Eclipse SDK (without JDT) and everything seems OK.

We are waiting on a version of WTP with the ICU changes to test with that.

The reason for these changes is that the previous behaviour was non-deterministic (based on the presence of something in a cache), and that in order to fix the above mentioned bug there is a possibility of introducing incompatible behaviour; we wanted to get this into M5 to maximize its exposure.

If you have code that uses the Common Navigator, please test it in the next couple of days (say by Weds 28 Jan) if there is a possibility of incompatibility in the way you use label providers.   See the comments in the above mentioned bug for more details.

If you do have compatibility problems, please immediately open a bug to Platform UI and we will get it addressed this week in 3.5M5, provided we get the bug report by Weds.