Sadly I do not understand this best practice solution.
Mainly because of two reasons.
First:
I've a product running on different language environments. The product is
set up at a customer by fitters having in general very view knowlage about
eclipse good practiceses. What they want is just one place where every
string used by the product is defined so that they can change it to the
customers wishes. It is not reasonable to let them scan each package for
property files just to performe a view minor tweaks.
Second:
A parts name, a commands desciption,a menus entry and so on. There are all
somehow part of the UI. I define their names and descriptions within the
plugin.property file. Usage of translated versions of these strings is
done automaticly by eclipse.
Why is custom generaded UI code (such as view content) less important that
it is nor a good practice to let it participate on this very handy
mechanism?
If this was possible, transaltion and customization of a whole plugin
could be done by using just one file!
Even when it might not be best practice, at least here should be some API
to access the plugin.properties file.
As you sad, finding and parsing the file manually would be painfull.
I'm questioning my self how reading of this file is done in eclipse. I
tried to debug my self into it, but could not finde the right place.
I'would open a request on this (creating API). But only if the eclipse
part that is responsible for reading the properties file is not
accessible. What means that I first have to finde it :)