Plan item

"Content-type-based editor lookup. The choice of editor is currently based on file name pattern. This is not very flexible, and breaks down when fundamentally different types of content are found in files with undistinguished file names or internal formats. For example, many different models with specialized editors get stored in XML format files named *.xml. Eclipse should support a notion of content type for files and resources, and use these to drive decisions like which editor to use. This feature would also be used by team providers when doing comparisons based on file type. The several existing file-type registries in Eclipse should be consolidated. [Platform Core, Platform UI] [Theme: User experience] (bug 37668, 51791, 52784)"

Overview document

An overview of the proposed solution is available here.

Related bug reports

A list of related bug reports is available here.

Current status

May 5th, 2004

Core content type infrastructure is being currently used by the new encoding support (Resources), content-sensitive object contributions (UI) and structured content comparisons (Compare)

April 28th, 2004

The adoption of content types for editor lookup has been postponed for after 3.0. Core content type infrastructure will be available for 3.0 (bug 60291)

April 6th, 2004

Proposal was made available.

Gathering feedback from the community.