[news.eclipse.platform] Re: How do I disable my own plugin at start up t

[Stefan Langer <mailtolanger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well the OSGI spec says that startup shouldn't take too long. And I have 
seen warnings in Eclipse stating that Plugin XY took longer than xxx 
seconds to startup and that the framework will not wait for the plugin 
to start up and continue with its startup routine. Most of the time the 
mentioned plugin gets started eventually but it won't be in the proper 
sequence anymore so if you depend on other stuff happening this will 
break your code I assume. Maybe one of the Equinox/Eclipse experts on 
this group can provide more insisght since I believe it is up to the 
OSGI implementation how to deal with lengthy startups.

You could stop your plugin and restart it using OSGI this way only your 
plugin will be shutdown and any plugin depending on yours. To test what 
will happen you might want to start eclipse with the -console parameter 
and issue the stop and start bundle commands manually. But be aware that 
when you start a plugin manually Eclipse will start it eagerly the next 
time you fire up Eclipse.

Since the error condition is very seldom just provide an appropriate 
dialog telling the user to restart the workbench. You could even provide 
a button in the dialog that will do it if the user has no other data to 
save. This will leave control to the user.

Of course your views and perspectives will still have to deal with the 
error condition so putting in some error handling code for the error 
will be a must.

Regards
Stefan


Farokh Morshed schrieb:
> Unfortunately, the error state is not recoverable.  It is also rare that 
> it could happen.  User has killed a process vital to the plugin or 
> uninstalled it in the middle of using the plugin.
>
> Once the user hits this error, the plugin has to be "restarted" before 
> it can be used again.  Of course, one way is to just restart Eclipse.
>
> It is probably acceptable for the user to restart Eclipse after saving 
> away unsaved stuff in other plugins.
>
> The issue is that time after user gets my popup message that the vital 
> server process has disappeard and he needs to restart, and before user 
> actually restarts.  During this time, our perspective is the current, 
> our menu buttons are everywhere, our views are open but not really 
> functional. Come to think of it, I am not sure what Eclipse could do for 
> me here.  I suppose I could fire an event to all my views to shutdown.
>
> Is there a public API for popping the current perspective?  That would 
> clean things up some.
>
> As for your suggestion to move the lengthy task of launching this server 
> process from start to first use of it, and that it could be skipped if 
> it took too long, I don't see anything to suggest that there is some 
> time limit for start.  Is there?  I need this server process during 
> method start under certain conditions!
>  
> Thank you.