[news.eclipse.tools] Re: publishing extension points - help!

[Judah Diament <djudah@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Vlad,

That is very usefull, but it doesn;t really answer my question. I saw in the API docs how
to access the registry to see what plugind are around for a given extension point. What I
didn;t see is how to CREATE a new extension point. That is, are extnesion points ONLY
declared in plugin.xml, or do you also have to do some java to create a new extension
point?

Thanks,
Judah

Vlad Klicnik wrote:

> Judah, the way you do this is by calling APIs in the
> org.eclipse.core.runtime package. In particular, the following are useful
>
> Platform.getPluginRegistry()
> IPluginRegistry.getXXX ... various calls to get descriptors for plugins,
> extension points, extensions, etc
> methods on IPluginDescriptor, IExtension, IExtensionPoint,
> IConfigurationElement
>
> So to find out which items were configured into your extension point
> "com.xyz.myplugin.foopoint" by some other plugin extensions you could do
>
> IConfigurationElement[] cfg;
> cfg =
> Platform.getPluginRegistry().getConfigurationElementsFor("com.xyz.myplugin.foopoint");
>
> To actually interact with one of the extensions (eg. with the first one in
> the list returned above) you could then call
>
> IFoo someFoo = (IFoo) cfg[0].createExecutableExtension("fooclass");
>
> and once you have your object you are off to the races (see the javadoc for
> explanation of the arguments). The idea is that others have plugged in
> extensions that define classes implementing your IFoo interface (required by
> the extension point) so you actually know how to interact with the resulting
> object.
>
> Also, see Help> Help Contents and select Platform Plug-In Developer Guide
> from the drop box.
>
> Hope this helps you get going.