[news.eclipse.dtp] Re: ODA Plugin Project Structure / References / Deplo

["Linda Chan" <lchan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris,

These seem to be general PDE questions.  The IDE help doc "Plug-in 
Development Environment Guide" (see Help->Help Contents) has pretty good 
info to start with.

By "standard Java project", do you mean your datacalc project is packaged in 
a library jar file?  It is a good practice to create a plug-in project to 
*wrap* a library jar file, for use by other plugin projects. This way, you 
don't need to make a copy of the library jar file to each of the plugin 
projects that use it.  And of course no need to change your existing project 
packaging either.
Then specify in the manifest.mf of your datacalc.oda plugin (using the 
plugin manifest editor's Dependencies tab to edit), its dependency on your 
library jar wrapper plugin.   This setup will let osgi take care of 
resolving the classes and loading them as needed.

You can also create a plugin project to wrap your test library.  Then 
specify in its manifest.mf, the plugin dependencies on your datacalc.oda 
plugin and all other dependencies   For any packages in your datacalc.oda 
plugin or other plugins that are accessed by your test code, you would want 
to specifiy them in "Export-Package:" in the corresponding plugin 
manifest.mf.  (See the plugin manifest editor's Runtime tab.)

If your datacalc.oda plugin has specified dependencies on your 
"DataCalculator" class library (or its wrapper plugin), there shouldn't be a 
need to pass an instance of it thru the oda setAppContext method.  Your test 
case should be able to call the IQuery interface methods, whose 
implementation in your datacalc.oda should then know to use your 
"DataCalculator" classes.
You might want to take a look at the JUnit test cases for the DTP ODA 
enablement data sources.  They are in DTP CVS repository 
(dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/datatools) under the 
HEAD/org.eclipse.datatools.enablement/tests/ folder.

Linda