[ui-best-practices-working-group] Whats the best practice for "Link with

[Mindaugas Idzelis <idzelis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm trying to find out what the general
consensus for a UI design concern I'm currently facing. I have an editor
that displays things that are also displayed in the various navigators
(common, resource, package explorer,etc) like web pages, files, etc. If
I enable "Link with editor" on the navigator, when I click in
the editor, the IResource that the editor is currently editing is shown
in the Navigator. This is not exactly what I want. I would rather have
the selected resource within the editor synchronize with the same display
of that resource in the navigator. 

I was able to get this function by manually listening to selection changes
in my editor, and on selection changes to set the same selection to the
various resource navigation views (Really, all ShowInTarget views)

Then someone suggested to me that I was doing something that was not "consistent"
with the way that base Eclipse behaves. Thus, I'm posing this question
to this mailing list to get some thoughts on this issue:

Would it be annoying or useful to have the "Link with editor"
option automatically synchronize with the selection of the editor, instead
of just the editors underlying resource? 

A more convervative approach for this synchronization function is something
that already is found in various places inside Eclipse. You can use the
"Show in..." context menu instead. This displays a contet menu
labeled: "Show In..." -> followed by a sub menu of the views
that are ShowInTarget compatible. 

I see this as being an issue to all editors that also show Resources. (UML,
Web, Database, etc)


Thanks,

Mindaugas Idzelis
IBM Rational Middleware