[news.eclipse.tools] Actions sets in 0.043

[jamsden@xxxxxxxxxx]

If you used action sets in 0.035 to extend the Workbench menu and toolbar 
with custom actions, you'll notice in 0.043 IActionSet and its 
implementation ActionSet are no longer part of the API. That's because you 
now add all the menu and toolbar items using the com.ibm.eclipse.ui.actionSets extension-point instead of subclassing 
ActionSet. Here's a simple example:

        <extension point = "com.ibm.eclipse.ui.actionSets">
          <actionSet
                id="org.eclipse.examples.helloworld.HelloWorldActionSet"
            label="Hello World"
                visible="true"
                description="The action set for the Eclipse Hello World 
example">
                <menu
 id="org.eclipse.examples.helloworld.HelloWorldMenu"
                        label="Samples">
                        <separator name="samples"/>
                </menu>
                <action 
id="org.eclipse.examples.helloworld.actions.HelloWorldAction"
 menubarPath="org.eclipse.examples.helloworld.HelloWorldMenu/samples"
                        toolbarPath="Normal" 
                        label="Hello World"
                        tooltip="Press to see a message"
                        icon="icons/helloworld.gif"
 class="org.eclipse.examples.helloworld.HelloWorldAction"/>
        </actionSet>
    </extension>

Class org.eclipse.examples.helloworld.HelloWorldAction implements 
IWorkbenchWindowActionDelegate to perform the action. The Workbench 
actually creates an action proxy (an IAction) for 
org.eclipse.examples.helloworld.actions.HelloWorldAction. This proxy hangs 
on to all the UI information from the extension-point markup so it can be 
displayed on the menu and toolbar, but does not actually instantiate the 
HelloWorldAction until it is actually used. Then the proxy delegates 
(hence the name of the IWorkbenchWindowActionDelegate interface) to the 
HelloWorldAction which does the real work. This delays the loading of your 
plug-in classes and their referenced classes until they are needed. The 
delegation happens through the IWorkbenchWindowActionDelegate.run(IAction 
proxyAction) method. The proxyAction argument is the actual proxy action 
initially created by the Workbench and contains all the UI information 
(label, tooltip, icon, etc.) above in case your action implementation 
needs to change anything, including selectability.