Bug 413264

Summary:	Allow cancellation of long-running file-open operations
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Missing name <chrisspen>
Component:	IDE	Assignee:	Platform UI Triaged <platform-ui-triaged>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3
Version:	4.4
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:

Description Missing name

2013-07-18 11:46:10 EDT

Please consider adding a feature to allow cancellation or killing of long-running file-open operations.

Far too many times I've accidentally clicked on an SVG file or a compressed JS/CSS file in the Project Explorer/Resource pane, only to have Eclipse hang indefinitely as it tries to render millions of tiles for a file that was never meant to be manually edited.

In this dreadful case, I currently have only two options:
1. Wait an hour for Eclipse to consume all my memory, causing disk swapping and eventually my entire OS to crash.
2. Quickly open a terminal and kill Eclipse, re-launch Eclipse, and then wait an hour for Eclipse to rebuild itself.

Either way, a simple mistake has cost me a considerable amount of time. Some sort of button, similar to the "cancel" button in the Tasks panel, that would cancel the ongoing file-open operation, would be immensely useful.

Comment 1 Paul Webster

2013-07-22 14:40:12 EDT

It's the opening editor that is reading the large file.  They basically have an InputStream they've extracted from their IFile.

They would have to implement some kind of cancel-able support.  What editor opens the SVG files?

PW

Comment 2 Missing name

2013-07-22 15:42:16 EDT

I think most XML editors include SVG in their file associations. In my case, I'm using the Colorer XML Editor.

Comment 3 Paul Webster

2013-07-23 13:26:06 EDT

You'll need to open a bug (as appropriate) for the Colorer editor then, to see if they can address cancelling of loading of a large file.

PW

Comment 4 Missing name

2013-07-23 14:20:07 EDT

As this issue potentially effects every single editor, it doesn't really seem practical to open bug reports/feature requests for each editor. Eclipse has no way to wrap the open file request in some handler the way it does for most other tasks?

Comment 5 Paul Webster

2013-07-23 14:33:56 EDT

The API involved here is the simple java io InputStream (and probably attendant wrapper streams).  That's not really progress-with-cancel material.

After identifying the file path object, eclipse leaves it up to each editor to load it's own information.  So we're left with opening a bug per editor.

PW