| Viewpart vs. Editorpart, proxy Editorpart, common Eclipse design question [message #468185] |
Tue, 04 August 2009 13:22 |
 chris
Messages: 9
Registered: July 2009 |
Junior Member |
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Dear Eclipse Community,
I am currently working on an academical project called KIEM. It tries to
make executions of graphical (e.g., EMF) models available in Eclipse as a
sub project of KIELER:
http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/trac/kieler/wiki/Project s/KIEM
Please take a short look at the screen snapshots that are located at the
bottom of the page.
The Execution Manager is currently implemented as a (savable) ViewPart as
it extends ISaveablePart2.
It manages DataComponent plug-ins that may take over the role of a data
observer or data producer or even both (these plug-ins implement Extension
Points).
The Execution Manger starts up with a default order of all loaded
DataComponents. But it allows the user to reschedule the execution order,
to disable DataComponents or even to add multiple instances or remove
DataComponents from the list. These execution sets can be saved in
*.execution files.
The user also wants to easily open execution set files into the Execution
Manager. Therefor a proxy EditorPart takes the selected file an triggers
the Execution Manager's ViewPart to open the chosen file.
This behavior might let one think that the Execution Manager should just
be an EditorPart and not a ViewPart at all (in order to get rid of the
proxy EditorPart).
But as you can see on the screen snapshot one also wants to have the
ViewActions that would not be available for editors. Also we would like to
drag the whole view out of the Workbench. The Execution Manager view
should relate to open Editors so it feels unnatural to let itself be an
editor.
On the other hand there is the possibility of splitting up the behavior
into a ViewPart (without editing options) and an EditorPart that just
allows editing without the ViewActions, both presenting the same list of
DataComponents to the user. This option also feels user unfriendly to me
as it might confuse the user because there is no clear visible but a
strong behavioral difference between both parts and the whole thing
becomes more complicated to use.
But in order to get some other opinions about this design question I'd
really like you to comment on that issue.
Thanks in advance!
Chris
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