[pde-ui-dev] RFC. a plug-in to produce Manifest Style editors.

[John Gentilin <gentijo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To All:

I posted this on the platform newsgroup and did not receive any
responses, thought maybe it was posted in the wrong fourm. Sorry
for any cross post confusion.

Original Message....

We are currently in the process of using Eclipse as the base
for our application. I believe one of our base plugin could
add value to the Eclipse project so I wanted to open a discussion
to see if there was any interest.

The Problem:
We need a multipage editor, similar to the Manifest editor, that
allows editing of XML files with minimal amount of coding. Note:
the focus of this project is based around editing XML files and
not a GUI builder.

A proposed solution:

Using the Xalan Extension Element, create a base Editor class that
allows the Plugin designer to describe the one of the XML editor
pages using XSL. As the transformation occurs, the form will be
created and at the same time tracking the XML context information
for each editing point. As the user modifies the form, the XML
document will be modified in place.

Sample XSL template could be:
<swt:form config=xyz.properties>
 <swt:layout id="name" type="type" attribute...>
      <swt:layoutdata id="name" type="type" attribute...>
          <swt:object id="name" type="type" attribute.../>
      </swt:layoutdata>
 </swt:layout>
</swt:form>

All elements will be named, this will allow an extending class to add
custom listeners by referring to objects by name

A loose coupling to the actual object type will be maintained by mapping
swt classes to elements using the type tag. A properties file will
define the mapping from the type tag to a class that wrappers the actual
swt/jface class. This would allow the XSL extension element classes to
keep up with new layouts or swt widgets.

Each extension element will two required attributes and as many optional
attributes to support the object type defined.

Some interesting Use Cases include the ability to have a List control 
and a section in the editor form that represents the detail of the
selected item in the list control. This is easy to solve if an extension
mechanism is provided that allows the transformation to fetch
attributes of a named control i.e. When a list box is selected, the
default action would be to refresh the form. The template that is
responsible for displaying the detail can ask the named list control for 
the selected item, this can be used as a component of the XPath 
statement used to select a particular element that is being displayed.

The XSL translation will generate the form in real time, i.e. Not a code
gen solution.

What I am looking for is;

What interest is there ?

How does this type of plugin fit into the road map for Eclipse ?

Any requested features ?

Should I target this plugin as something that could be incorporated
into the platform ?

Thanks
John G