[wtp-dev] Adding Tabbed Properties to existing editors

[Karen Moore <karen.moore@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I am a Dali project developer working on the Java Persistence API (JPA) 
tooling for WTP.  We would like to use the Tabbed Properties Pages, but 
we do not  have our own editor.  Our solution for the .5 release built 
on Calisto, was to have a separate properties view from the Eclipse 
properties view and not use the tabbed properties framework. This might 
be the best solution, but users have asked why we aren't using the 
Eclipse Properties view.  I am asking here first since the original 
tabbed properties development occurred in WTP.

Our requirement is to have a single way to edit JPA properties from Java 
files (using annotations) and from an XML file.  We do not want to 
create our own editor because users will want to use the Java Editor and 
the XML editor directly.  The wtp xml editor already supplies a 
properties page (not Tabbed) so creating an adapterFactory to supply a 
Tabbed Properties page for our plugin does not work.  Even if we could 
make that work, we would be taking over the properties for the xml 
editor and the java editor, this is not playing nice with eclipse.  Has 
anyone hit this problem and do you have any suggestions for how we might 
work around it?  It would be nice if both the Java Editor and the XML 
editor used the tabbed properties framework, then we could plug-in 
easily and extend it with our own properties.  If other plugins had 
similar requirements to us (JAXB could be an example that uses java 
annotations), they would also be able to plug-in new tabs and not 
override the existing ones.

Another idea: is there any way to use the Tabbed Properties framework 
without the Eclipse Properties view? We really like the look of it and 
how it makes extension so easy.

thanks,
Karen