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Conditional project catalog? [message #1778055]

Fri, 08 December 2017 11:50

Eclipse User

Hi, again.

I have another question, about project catalogs this time.
Maybe I should explain our use case first. We maintain our own Eclipse distributions: they are based on official ones but come with additions and a custom configuration. All of this is achieved through a preconfigured OOMPH installer. It also implies we have our own catalog.

Now, we have different product versions, based on different versions of Eclipse.
And we would like to have different projects based on the selected version. One version will be the new one and will have an updated project catalog (maybe with new features). While the catalogs for old product versions would only be kept for maintenance.

Maybe this structure will help to understand:

- org.eclipse.setup
- core.products.setup

- neon/
       - neon.product.setup
       - neon.projects.setup
- oxygen/
       - oxygen.product.setup
       - oxygen.projects.setup

The question is about whether it is possible to show the projects of oxygen.projects.setup when the user selects the oxygen version or neon.projects.setup when the user selects the neon version. For the moment, we only have a common set of projects, but we cannot assume new additions will be compatible with old versions.

As an example, we have a setup task that downloads a version of Tomcat.
If we add a new version of Tomcat, we cannot be sure it will work with older versions of Eclipse. So, with this example, we would like to freeze old versions (both products and projects) and add a new one.

How can we define a conditional selection of a project catalog?
I have seen filters, but they apply to setup tasks only. We would need this but at a higher level (based as an example on the scope.product.version.name variable). Is this possible?

Re: Conditional project catalog? [message #1778075 is a reply to message #1778055]

Sat, 09 December 2017 02:59

Eclipse User

No, what you describe is not supported at this time.

A setup task also has a "restrictions" feature which allows it to be restricted to a certain scope so you can make tasks themselves tasks conditional to the selected/current scope in this way. You'll see it's used primarily in the user.setup to store the values of variables though restricted to a certain scope. So you might define the variable for the choices of Tomcat versions multiple times restricted to the product versions where they are known to be applicable.

Another useful thing is Configurations:

https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Oomph_Authoring#Automation_and_Specialization_with_Configurations

With this you can provide pre-configured choices of product version and project streams, along with any other setup tasks (variables for example) that can be applied to the installer to make it easier for the user to choose what they should choose.

And yes, there are filters too, which have been made more general so that they can use not just a system/environment property value but the value of a variable, so can be used much like restrictions. But as you noticed, this too applies only for variables.

Nothing currently allows a scope to be restricted to another scope.

Re: Conditional project catalog? [message #1778249 is a reply to message #1778075]

Tue, 12 December 2017 05:19

Eclipse User

A configuration allows to associate a product version and project streams.
If I want to provide several choices, I have to create several configurations. And one has to be loaded manually or from the configuration. It is not the same approach than our pre-configured catalog with a single wizard. Like the documentation states it, a configuration is a template. I understand its interest, but it does not fit my needs.

I do not know what I will decide about it.
But thank you for your answers.

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