Description Alberto Ricart 2006-03-14 16:50:04 EST

Neither IDE.openEditor nor IWorkbenchPage provide access to 
WorkbenchPage#openEditor(EditorInput, editorId, activate, matchFlags). This handy internal method enables client code to open editors and specify whether both the path and editor id should be matched, before returning an existing editor. The currently public implementation simply matches on the path, and if the file is already opened it returns that editor even if the ID is incorrect.

While for most applications the above is the correct behaviour, for some it doesn't work. On our case, we have custom EMF editors that are backed by a custom file buffer implementation that allows concurrent editing of a file by tools and editors. So opening multiple editors on the same file is handled correctly.

The trouble is that the API provided by IDE or IWorkbenchPage implementers doesn't expose the functionality we require to open the desired editor on the already opened file, so the only workaround is to use WorkbenchPage#openEditor(EditorInput, editorId, activate, matchFlags) to accomplish this.

We would like the IDE class to add a method that exposes this functionality in a way that we can count on in future versions of eclipse.