[ve-dev] anyone thought of adding support for Draw2D to VE

[Gary Wu <Gary.Wu@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Has anyone thought of adding Draw2D support to VE? I've wanted that support
for quite some time and didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the project
plan. 

I started reading the VE code to see how much effort it'll take to implement
that feature. My starting point is the editor class
(JavaVisualEditorPart.java). I found that to add palette entries for Draw2D
figures, I need to extend the org.eclipse.ve.java.core.contributors
extension point. 

I also found that there are three ways for Visual Editor for Java to find my
contribution to its palette. When Visual Editor for Java looks for
contributions to its palette, it looks for containers that implement
IVEContributor, container ids and plugin ids. For container ids and plugin
ids, there still needs to have a class that implements IVEContributor. That
class is
org.eclipse.ve.internal.java.codegen.editorpart.JavaVisualEditorPart.Default
VEContributor. 

I figure that using container id will be easier. To use the container id
approach, I need to define the Draw2D controls I want to contribute in a
model that conforms to palette.ecore. In that model, I'll need to decide
which type of palette creation tool entry I should use for which Draw2D
figure. Various types of palette creation tool entries such as
AnnotatedCreationEntry, EMFCreationToolEntry, EMFPrototypeToolEntry are
modeled in palette.ecore. 

I found that if I use EMFPrototypeToolEntry, I will have to provide
something like eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.ve.swt_1.0.1\CheckBox.xmi that
conforms to instance.ecore. The instance.ecore model looks cryptic to me. 

If anyone can provide me a guide of how to choose among the various palette
creation tool entries and/or of how to make use of instance.ecore, that
would be very helpful!

Thanks,
Chaur




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