Description Karice McIntyre 2006-03-06 12:54:34 EST

In RTL orientation, there are some strings that should maintain basic LTR reading order - examples are file paths, URLs and file associations.  Even though Eclipse provides full BiDi support as of 3.1, these strings are special cases and so are not rendered correctly due to the presence of neutral characters - that is, characters whose directionality is determined based on the directionality of its surrounding text.  See http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/ for the full specification on the Bidirectional algorithm.  The Eclipse platform now provides API that will render these strings correctly in RTL locales (Hebrew and Arabic) by inserting directional marker characters into the string in the appropriate places.  Strings that utilize this API are intended to have an overall reading order of left to right (e.g.file paths, file associations, URLs) and are segmented according to delimiter characters where each segment will have the usual BiDi rendering algorithm applied to it.  To use this API, call
    org.eclipse.osgi.util.TextProcessor.process(String, String) 
where the first string is the string to manipulate (e.g. a file path, URL, etc) and the second string is a string of delimiters which define how the string should be segmented.
  
Example 1 
string=d:\AAA\bbb\CCC\ddd.html
delimiter=".:\"

Example 2
string=*.html
delimiter="*."

Example 3
http://AAA/bbb/ccc.html
delimiter=".:/"


Since file paths and URLs will likely be the most common use case for this API, a set of default delimiters="./\:" is provided so a call to 
    org.eclipse.osgi.util.TextProcessor.process(String) 
is all that is required in these cases.  

Test cases to check for:
URL example to test = http:\\abc\ABC where lower case is Latin (e.g. English) and upper case is Hebrew/Arabic
Without using the new API, it renders CBA\http:\\abc

File path to test = d:\abc\ABC where lower case is Latin (e.g. English) and upper case is Hebrew/Arabic
Without using the new API, it renders CBA\d:\abc

Originating from bug 119517.

Please do a complete review of the UI elements of this component in order to identify and call the new API for all occurrences of file/directory paths, URLs, file associations and any other strings that should have overall left to right reading order.  Check views, wizards, property and preference pages, and dialogs as a starting point.  Some examples of this problem that I have found in this component thus far are:

*Import User Libraries Dialog: File location field.
*Keys preference page: Key Sequences with 2 consecutive neutral characters (like Ctrl+.)
*Linked Resources preference page: Defined path variables
*New project wizard: Default location field
*Import Preferences: From file field
*Import File System and Archive: From directory and Into folder fields
*Export File System and Archive: To directory field
*Edit External Web Browser dialog: Location field
*Edit Variable Entry dialog: Path field
*New Variable: Location field
*Swtich workspace dialog: Workspace field
*Problems view: Resource column (ABC.java displays java.ABC should be CBA.java)