[platform-swt-dev] Random thoughts

[Amine Chadly <amine@xxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

First of all I hope this is the right place where to post this, if not
please accept my sincere apologies.

I have been facing an interresting exception while using TreeViewer
and TableViewer.
After some painful sessions of debugging, it finally came to this simple
issues :
In some cases the getText of the tree's ILabelProvider was returning 
null when called, which blocked everything from being displayed.
I understand it is very stupid to return null for the getText() call,
but the exception I was facing did little to help me find the problem
(Assertion failed -- the application has not been initialized).
I spent a lot of time trying to find what I was wrongly initializing in
my swt components whereas the bug was just in front of me enjoying the
show :).
I had a similar problem while updating a Table through a selection
listener. A buggy piece of code was throwing a CastError exception that
was probably captured by the table's ILabelProvider and turned into
another cryptic Assertion failed "the application has not been
initialized".
This problem has been reproducible on eclipse 2.1.2 and 3.0M5.

Another little thing while playing around with the ErrorDialog jface
class. As you may know, the constructor of ErrorDialog expects you to
provide a IStatus. While instanciating Status objects, I came to realize
that if you pass to the constructor of ErrorDialog a Status which
severity is different from the displayMask, well you just don't get
anything prompted when calling open(). The call just returns a nice 0
and that is pretty much it.

I don't know if these should be considered as bugs (after all I was at
the origin of the problems), but I wanted to see what you guys thought 
about it (More helpful messages would be nice ;).

In any case, good job for the achievements with Swt.

I have a few general questions that I didn't manage to find an answer
for :
 o Is there a way to make remarks or propose help concerning the eclipse
 website. (Lack of screenshots, no documentation link in the left
 menu etc.)
 o Is there a way to help for snippets ? (Add jface snippets, and
 screenshots to the existing ones etc.)
 o Is there an update somewhere about the linux/qt port?
 o Why a newsgroup and not a mailing list for user questions :-)) ?

Thank you for reading that far, I hope I didn't confuse anybody, and
that you found something interresting in it ;).

Best regards,
 -amine