How to handle property sheet from customized editor in eclipse plugin development ?

Question

I have to bind my editor widget objects in property sheet.So that i can the property of my widget from property view. Please help me on this, if possible provide me some code snippets.

Answer 1

You have a good example in the Getting started with Properties

Using the Properties view is simple enough.
Since it shows properties for the selected object, the first step to using it is to make sure that the workbench selection service knows about the object selected in your view. There’s an entire Eclipse Corner article written on the subject of the selection service

public void createPartControl(Composite parent) {
    viewer = new TableViewer(parent, SWT.MULTI | SWT.H_SCROLL | SWT.V_SCROLL);
    viewer.setContentProvider(new ViewContentProvider());
    viewer.setLabelProvider(new ViewLabelProvider());

    getSite().setSelectionProvider(viewer);

    viewer.setInput(getViewSite());
}

Once you have your view contributing to the workbench selection, you need to make sure that the objects that your view is selecting contribute properties

(extract)

public class Person implements IPropertySource {
    private String name;
    private Object street;
    private Object city;

    public Person(String name) {
     this.name = name;
     this.street = "";
     this.city = "";
    }

    public Object getEditableValue() {
     return this;
    }

    public IPropertyDescriptor[] getPropertyDescriptors() {
     return new IPropertyDescriptor[] {
       new TextPropertyDescriptor("name", "Name"),
       new TextPropertyDescriptor("street", "Street"),
       new TextPropertyDescriptor("city", "City")
     };
    }

I indicated earlier that this solution is “not necessarily [the] most correct”. This is because, for this to work, my domain object needs to know about the very view-centric (and Eclipse-centric) notion of being a property source; in short, there is a tight-coupling between the model and view and this not a good thing™.

Using adapter is a better approach, as described in this article:
Person should implement IAdaptable.

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See also this recent article on how to create a custom property view

how to hack the Properties View to listen only to a specific view.

The isImportant() method is the one which decides whether to create an IPage for the specific IWorkbenchPart or not.
The idea is to override that method and return false for all the workbenchPart that we are not interested in. Lets create the view first:

<view
            class="com.eclipse_tips.views.CustomPropertiesView"
            icon="icons/sample.gif"
            id="com.eclipse-tips.views.customePropertiesView"
            name="My Properties View">
</view>

The CustomPropertiesView should extend PropertySheet and override the isImportant():

public class CustomPropertiesView extends PropertySheet {

 @Override
 protected boolean isImportant(IWorkbenchPart part) {
  if (part.getSite().getId().equals(IPageLayout.ID_PROJECT_EXPLORER))
   return true;
  return false;
 }
}

In this case, I'm making the view only to respond to Project Explorer and ignore other views

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According to this thread, the same principle should be valid for an Editor instead of a View.

The property sheet listens to the workbench page selection provider.
The selection provider depends on what viewer/editor is active.
Each editor/viewer provides their own selection provider to use when that editor/viewer is active.
This way the property sheet doesn't care who is active, it just listens to the selection provider.
That way depending upon the view, a different set of properties are displayed.
For example, the Navigator view provides IResource selections, so the property sheet then displays IResource properties when the Navigator is active.

The Workbench Selection mechanism is illustrated in this article

The ISelectionListener is a simple interface with just one method.
A typical implementation looks like this:

private ISelectionListener mylistener = new ISelectionListener() {
    public void selectionChanged(IWorkbenchPart sourcepart, ISelection selection) {
    if (sourcepart != MyView.this &&                               // 1
        selection instanceof IStructuredSelection) {               // 2
        doSomething(((IStructuredSelection) selection).toList());  // 3
        }
    }
};

Depending on your requirements your listener implementation probably needs to deal with the following issues as shown in the code snippet above:

• In case we also provide selections (e.g. a view or editor) we should exclude our own selection events from processing. This avoids unexpected results when the user selects elements within our part (1).
• Check whether we can handle this kind of selection (2).
• Get the selected content from the selection and process it (3).