Description Ed Willink 2008-08-19 02:06:54 EDT

The UniversalEditor is currently automatically registered as an editor
for each org.eclipse.imp.runtime.languageDescription file extension.
An icon can be specified, but the editor name, editor class and the
contribution class cannot.

A separate org.eclipse.ui.editors can be specified with the UniversalEditor
or a derived UniversalEditor or a MultiPageEditorPart that uses a
UniversalEditor for some pages.

The redundant automatic registration can then be 'suppressed' by specifying
an empty string for the file extensions. This seems to be a slight abuse of 
the language registration.

[I appreciate that UniversalEditor aims to provide extension via services,
but provision of any unforeseen services will always need more flexibility.
Today I need to extend UniversalEditor to put in the PropertyPage adapter
that will unwrap the ModelTree selection to get properties to work.]

Suggest one of:

1) add the org.eclipse.ui.editors name,class,contributorClass
attributes to org.eclipse.imp.runtime.languageDescription.

2) add a registerEditor attribute with default true value
to org.eclipse.imp.runtime.languageDescription.

3) remove the auto-registration, instead requiring that all editor
registrations occur through use of an org.eclipse.ui.editors.

4) add an org.eclipse.imp.runtime.editorRegistration that when
present defines name,icon,class,contributorClass of the editor
and inhibits and similar behaviour from the languageDescription.

[Observation: Is it really helpful to have 15 or so extensions?
Wouldn't it be more sensible for the language registration to 
have many nested capabilities?]