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PDE's New Plug-in Project Wizard allows templates to be provided to help users create plug-ins with specific initial behaviour/capabilities. Our product uses these templates to generate transformation plug-ins. Unfortunately, most new users cannot find this functionality since they don't even know what a "plug-in" is. To help user find the wizard, we introduced a "New Wizard" under our own "Transformation" category. This wizard simply launches PDE's New Plug-in Project Wizard. Unfortunately this is still counter intuitive since we still show the templates page and not pre-select the "Transformation" one. Ideally, such "template specific" wizard should probably start by the template page and optionally let the use "dig into" the next pages to override project creation defaults. Selecting the right template from the PDE Wizard sounds like a no-brainer for us Eclipse developers... but customer often do not know anything about Eclipse. The enhancement request is to offer a reusable wizard that is template driven, as opposed to plug-in driven.
Wassim, do you know what he's on about? <g> Is this the only solution to the problem? Couldn't we just provide some extra API on the PDE Wizard for selecting the template that he wants?
That would definitely help. However, that still leaves the user confused about having to specify plug-in project parameters when he/she asked for a new transformation. Ideally, the first wizard pages would be the template ones. These would provide valide defaults for the new plug-in project parameters (e.g. plug-in name = transformation name). The user can hit 'finish' as soon as the template pages are done, or can go 'next' to customize the new plug-in projects' parameters.
I need to understand the situation a bit more without diving into implementation details just yet. Frederic, your main concern here seems to be that your users don't know what a plug-in is and should not be overwhelmed by that concept. That's a fine usability point, but not an easy one to solve because you cannot shield these concepts for too long if you want to get something done with this template. So let's say we have a wizard that shows templates as the first page. The moment they press Finish and the code is generated, the manifest editor will open and they will very quickly be exposed plug-ins, extensions, launch configurations, etc. So a New wizard with the new order of pages would have only acted to delay the introduction to the plug-in concept by 2 seconds and we're back to where we were.
I agree bringing up the manifest file is not helping much. I guess this needs to be customized as well. I can easily imagine a transformation manifest file editor opening up instead. I will continue with the transformation example, I assume this can be generalized. People implementing transformation only need to know about the transformation framework they have to code against. They don't need to know about dependencies, deployment, extension-points, extension, etc... Even launching the transformation is different from running a standard plug-in. Advanced users will take advantage of the 'plug-in' nature of the transformation, but beginners shouldn't need to know about it.
Frederic, it does not sound to me like you need PDE at all for this. Our constituents are plug-in developers so it makes no sense for us to invest in hiding concepts of plug-ins/extensions points/manifest editors. We are in the business of promoting all these concepts. What you really need, I believe, is bug 36960, which is to be addressed at the platform level, not PDE. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 36960 ***
