programmatically change the background color in eclipse

Question

Hi everyone,
I have a question related to eclipse plugin development. Is there any means by which I can programmatically change the background color in eclipse. I am able to change the text foreground color by calling setTextColor(color, offset, length, controlRedraw) in ITextViewer but I don't find any function by which I can change the background color of the text. If anyone has been through this kindly share your thoughts.

Thanks arav

Answer 1

I am not sure this can be done easily, short of extending your own version of a Text Editor, here you provide a Configuration Class which inturn accepts a PresentationReconciler Class which is like a Rule Class that tells you if you need to put a Foreground or a Background Color

See this document

PresentationReconciler

• IPresentationDamager: define dirty region given a text change
• IPresentationRepairer: recreate presentation for dirty region
• DefaultDamagerRepairer does both, based on a token scanner
• ITokenScanner: parse text into a token stream
• RuleBasedScanner uses simple rules

Extract from the presentation

_{From Text Editor Recipes, Season’s recipes for your text editor
Tom Eicher, IBM Eclipse Team}

Here, the null background color means, takes the default system background for that widget. (so here: white).
But you could specify whatever color you want, based on the partitioning of your document and on the rules that would apply.

Answer 2

I know this was asked a while ago, but in case anyone is looking for another solution, I thought I would post the following:

Since you are able to use the setTextColor method, then you should be able to use the changeTextPresentation method as well.

In the case of my plug-in, I have a TextListener that calls the TextChanged method I overwrote. I did the following to add background color using the changeTextPresentation method. In doing so, I was able to get a Green background with Black foreground. Not that I would want this, of course, but just for testing purposes.

public void TextChanged(TextEvent event){
...
TextPresentation presentation = new TextPresentation();
TextAttribute attr = new TextAttribute(new ColorManager().getColor(MyConstants.BLACK),
      new ColorManager().getColor(MyConstants.GREEN), style);
presentation.addStyleRange(new StyleRange(startOffset, tokLength, attr.getForeground(),
      attr.getBackground());
sourceViewer.changeTextPresentation(presentation, true); //sourceViewer is a global variable passed to my TextListener class constructor.
}