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Currently sapphire has property editors for simple text, long text, and html. It would be nice if there were a way to support editing blocks of code or script. The specialites of a code editor would be things like line numbers, syntax highlighting, and other enhanced editing capabilities.
I have a prototype of this type type of property editor that embeds a ITextEditor where a normal Text control would be in the case of a normal sapphire value property editor that uses a textbox. However, in my prototype I'm just activiting a custom property render as a factory hint. How would we want this to be done in the framework or how would this code/script editor be activated? By annotation or do we want the user to activate the code editor via the factory hint?
Let's start with just the factory hint. Once the new property editor is fairly complete, we can discuss automatic activation strategy.
So for the first step in the contribution do we want to just hardcode the platform default textEditor or do we want to discuss a strategy for finding the right "ITextEditor"?
I think we will need some way to specify the content type. The part that makes this experimental to me is that I am not sure how many editor implementations will play nice with this embedding. Which ones have you tried so far?
I've tried default TextEditor which works fine. I've tried the JavaEditor with groovy extensions to edit a groovy script. The editors are not as full featured as their Full editorPart counter parts. I plan on trying a few more soon, like JavaScript. Eventually I may even bundle a basic syntax-color and code folding editor that support like this one: http://www.gstaff.org/colorEditor/
But those additional editors are for my adopter product, for the framework, perhaps we should just stick with platform textEditor and maybe give an option for adopters to turn on the contentType queriying? So if they know it will work (because they have tested it, etc) they could turn the querying on?
Is there a clear advantage of plain text editor over a plain text box? I would be most interested in including this feature in Sapphire if it can be demonstrated to work well with at least one or two prominent source editors... Perhaps Java and XML for starters?
The advantages for platform text editor over basic text box are not overwhelming but still somewhat better: - line numbers - shift/right left actions - whitespace handling - spellchecking But I agree, the JavaEditor, XML Editor would be good litmus tests. I've tried both JavaEditor and XMLEditor locally and both seem to embed without errors, not for sure how fully functionaly their features, would require more poking around. In my prototype the nested editors don't have all fo their global actions wired up correctly so not all keybindings work or popup everything you would expect, but some of that is likely just due to my incomplete prototype at this point.
That's encouraging. To move forward with evaluating the feasibility of this, let's add @ContentType annotation, but it's unlikely to be the final form of this feature's enablement. Need to think through of how this should logically interact with the existing @Type facility.
Do you have a preference on what this should new class/capability should be called? CodePropertyEditorRenderer, SourcePropertyEditorRenderer? ContentTypePropertyEditorRenderer
Created attachment 210556 [details] Patch #1 Here is a patch for prototype of this feature. Here are a few FYIs... - renderer is called CodeValuePropertyEditorRenderer. I'm open to alternative names, Script, Source, Content, ... I just went with code for first prototype. - Added a new top level adapt method to SapphirePart so that in this new property editor renderer I can grab a reference to the IEditorSite with a simple getPart().adapt() call. This prototype is missing the following items to be complete: - changes to sapphire model from source editor don't propagate back to embedded ITextEditor - still need dispose/cleanup of embedded text editors. Known issues - in the case of XmlEditor, instead of StructureTextEditor embedded, it embeds a MultiPageEditorPart, so you have the unneeded design/source tabs, need to determine best method for handling this case. - there are some focus handling issues when multiple editors on same details page
Created attachment 210557 [details] sapphire-gallery.xml Sample sapphire gallery to show new code properties
Created attachment 211778 [details] patch-2 (requires patch-1 on bug 372816) This is a new patch with the SapphirePart adapt() mechanism removed (which has been added to bug 372816
