Re: [platform-ui-dev] Activities and Contexts - Important Update

[Chris McLaren <Chris_McLaren@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> My first question's an easy one - How do you
configure activities manually in 
> current builds? The menu item seems to have gone away and I can't
find where 
> it was moved to.

i think kim answered this part.

> Next, you hinted at something that's important to us - opening and
closing 
> views via activities/contexts. The last time I checked, toggling activities
> didn't effect view visibility. Will this change?
>
> Multi-language debugging is a case that particularly
begs this support. There 
> are debuggers built on top of Eclipse that let the user debug the
same 
> program through many languages (imagine a JSP stack frame below a
Java frame 
> below a C frame). This is currently a bit of a mess for the user because
they 
> get a ton of views open in the debug perspective and they have to
manually 
> activate the applicable views everytime they move between layers.
Itwould be 
> great if applicable views would automatically either come to the top
or 
> open/close as the user selected stack frames.

yes, i'd like this to change. but it needs some thought.


availability of views based on activity (i.e. whether
they show up in the show 
view dialog, etc.) is a simple activity pattern matching
problem which should
be done.

for the set of available views, having some of these
views open and close 
automatically by active context is a slightly harder
problem, but more 
interesting to me i think.

we need to look at how the layout will be affected
by context changes. perhaps
we will need to provide some notion of 'pinning' views
that the user doens't
want to disappear/reappear - or, visa versa - having
the user choose views.

constant ui instability is my concern here, as contexts
are prone to activate
and deactivate frequently.

> On a side note, I noticed that the ability to exclude patterns from
activity 
> bindings recently went away. This seems like a problem with the way
the 
> pattern matching works today. For example, in Javaland, there's a
"Developing 
> Java" activity that matches to, say, org.eclipse.jdt.ui.*. Now
we'd like to 
> add an activity, "Developing Java Applets" with a pattern
> org.eclipse.jdt.ui.applets.*. My understanding is that as long as
a pattern 
> matches an enabled activity, it will appear. So you can't turn Applets
off 
> while Java is on. Assuming my understanding is correct, I'd like to
see the 
> pattern matching work differently. I think the algorithm should be
to look 
> for the pattern that most closely matches the ID in question and then
filter 
> based on the state of that activity. This would allow for people to
provide 
> effective activities at multiple levels of granularity within a namespace.

i'm going to lunch.. then i'll have an answer for
this..