[platform-ui-dev] Tues 17th: Shared Images

[Paul Webster <pwebster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bug 246224 [Contributions] Accessing SharedImages in plugin.xml (for
ex. org.eclipse.ui.menus)
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=246224

I'd like to discuss this during next week's UI call.  There are a
couple of options here ranging from the bare minimum to the esoteric
:-)

examples:
Bare Minimum.  With the fix for
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=250432 we simply publish
an interface with string constants that look like
platform:/plugin/org.eclipse.ui.views/$nl$/icons/full/eview16/prop_ps.gif.
 Anybody that wants to can copy these into their icon="" attributes.
No tooling support.

We code org.eclipse.ui.plugin.AbstractUIPlugin.imageDescriptorFromPlugin(String,
String) to also check in the shared images cache so values like
IMG_DEF_VIEW can be copied into the icon="" attributes.  No tooling

More complex:

We enhance PDE identifier schema support so that 1) you can specify 2
types for one attribute and 2) you can use XPath to narrow your
identifiers.   Then icon="" can be either a resource or identifier,
and identifiers can be selected from a certain type of extension point
that would allow anybody to publish their own shared images and be
picked up by the tool.  This is hard to generalize the PDE support and
still get our specific behaviour.

We write a custom attribute (that can hopefully be re-used by anybody)
that we would use in our icon="" attributes.  That would allow us to
show the user whatever values we want (contributed by extension,
grabbed from runtime maps, whatever).  This is probably the most
successful of the complex options, but we would need to specify the
desired behaviour and limit the scope.


PW

-- 
Paul Webster
Hi floor.  Make me a sammich! - GIR