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Summary says it all. When a user imports some preferences, they're not necessarily done with the dialog. For example, they may want to view/modify preferences that they imported from a colleague.
Agree.
But the dialog is in an invalid state. Consider 1) Open the dialog 2) Change some preference 3) Export You want export to export your change so we do a performOK before the export. This means that you can no longer cancel so the dialog is closed 1) Open the dialg 2) Import some prefences 3) The page in the dialog does not show the imported state, if you hit OK we will save the old state in the page. These complications arise from overloading the dialog with the import/export actions.
Not critical for 2.0. Defer for reconsideration later.
Reopened for investigation
If we were to change this behaviour we would force the developers of preference pages to handle property change events to get this. This would be a lot of extra work and should only be done if it is really a big win for usability.
How about just reopening the preference dialog?
Note that the same applies to the Export button. If we have to close the dialog because of some implementation problem, we should reopen the dialog to put the user back where they started. As a quick hack, I tossed the code from OpenPreferencesAction.run() in at the end of WorkbenchPreferenceDialog.loadPressed() and it achieved the desired effect. After the import, the dialog closed then reopened with the new values. Ideally, the dialog could do something like dispose of the existing preference pages when the user imports and then recreate the pages (thus pulling in the new values) as necessary. Short of this, closing/reopening the page is an improvement.
My 2Cts: May be the Window type for the prefeence is not the most accurate one. Since there is a lot of information on this window (And it will grow certainly), why not consider using the "standard" Perspectives/Views paradigm? For instance one could have a Navigator on the Left showing the different options/preferences, and the details on the right (one could even imagine a GUI view and XML or Text additionals view) This way, the Export/Import buttons could appear on a menu for instance. One could even imagine importing/exporting only fragments of the Preferences... Regards, Didier. PS: I hope I didn't disturb you with those lines.
There are currently no plans to work on this feature
