[Wtp-wst-dev] How to modify/disable sections or controls within the serv

[Georg Voutsinos <georg.voutsinos@xxxxxxxxx>]

Title: How to modify/disable sections or controls within the service editor overview page?

Hello,

My question regards to the service editor overview page implementation:

We (at Swordfish project) have implemented a custom server adapter for publishing Swordfish related components (consumer / provider) to a remote Swordfish server runtime over HTTP. We currently neither support local deployment nor automated publishing in case of resource changes or build events, nor starting or stopping the remote server over the UI. In order to avoid confusion we want to disable the possibility to choose automated publishing as well as start/stop timeout configuration within the overview page for our specific server type.

After a little research I've found the brand new extension point 'org.eclipse.wst.server.ui.serverEditorOverviewPageModifier' which has been introduced with the enhancement request https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=296731. This sounds promising as it should enable us to modify existing UI controls or even overview page sections respectively. But the current implementation of "org.eclipse.wst.server.ui.editor.ServerEditorOverviewPageModifier" does only support the modification of the "general" section, not the "publishing" or "timeouts" section of the overview page because  "ServerEditorOverviewPageModifier" are only invoked within "createGeneralSection” method of the "org.eclipse.wst.server.ui.internal.editor.OverviewEditorPart" class. So this currently does not help.

I've also tried the approach of inheriting from "org.eclipse.wst.server.ui.internal.editor.OverviewEditorPart", modifying the desired controls by overwriting the methods "createPublishingSection" and "createTimeoutsSection" and specifying the inheriting class as editorPage of our server type. - But this, of course, is a very bad idea, would depend on internal API and is not working at all.

So my questions are:

- Is there any other possibility to disable "publishing" and "timeouts" configuration (or even the complete sections) within the server editor overview page for our specific server type? Did I miss an existing approach?

- If there is no other approach: Couldn't "OverviewEditorPart" be extended to also invoke "ServerEditorOverviewPageModifier" within the methods "createPublishingSection" and "createTimeoutsSection" just like it is implemented for "createGeneralSection"?

- Would you accept a related patch delivery for Helios if I would try to extend the current implementation to be invoked for the additional overview page sections - or is it too late in the release process for extending this experimental new API yet?

- In general: How I would restrict my "ServerEditorOverviewPageModifier" to only make the desired modifications in case of my specific server type? Shouldn't the extension point provide the possibility to specify server type ids and be invoked only if any ID matches - like editorPages and editorPageSections extension points do? (BTW: The same question regards to the implementation of the extension point "org.eclipse.swordfish.tooling.server.ui.serverCreationWizardPageExtension".)

Thank you very much for your attention.

Best regards
Georg