TargetInvocationException when calling performFinish() on any subclass of NewItemWizard in Eclipse JDT UI plugins

Question

I'm posting this on behalf of the 30 or so projects that seem to be suffering from this problem without any resolution.

Basically the problem boils down to, a subclass of org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.wizards.NewElementWizard (which is the "Wizard" that controls the creation of new JDT elements like projects, packages, classes, etc -- this problem seems to happen no matter what reason you're subclassing for) overloads performFinish() and calls super.performFinish() as part of that call. So far so good, but for some reason if this happens on an empty workspace (which is often the case for new projects), the super.performFinish() call fails with an exception similar to the following:

java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at org.eclipse.jface.operation.ModalContext.run(ModalContext.java:350)
at org.eclipse.jface.wizard.WizardDialog.run(WizardDialog.java:851)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.wizards.NewElementWizard.performFinish(NewElementWizard.java:133)
at com.canoo.wizard.newproject.NewULCProjectWizard.performFinish(NewULCProjectWizard.java:118)
at org.eclipse.jface.wizard.WizardDialog.finishPressed(WizardDialog.java:680)
at org.eclipse.jface.wizard.WizardDialog.buttonPressed(WizardDialog.java:355)
at org.eclipse.jface.dialogs.Dialog$3.widgetSelected(Dialog.java:660)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TypedListener.handleEvent(TypedListener.java:90)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.EventTable.sendEvent(EventTable.java:66)

or something similar to that -- the error is strikingly similar across dozens of different projects that I've found in the process of Google'ing about for this error, whether the subclass of the NewItemWizard happens to be a Project Wizard, a Class Wizard, whatever.

Some of the people reporting this problem later post that it was caused by a "version mismatch" but, maddeningly, they never give any details as to what versions were mistmatching with what -- and I've tried my code on Linux, Windows, and OS X so I doubt it's some very version-or-platform-specific nuance.

Lastly, there does not seem to be anything in the Eclipse bugzilla even tangentially related to this problem.

Has anyone run into this before, since it seems so ubiquitous? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

InvocationTargetException is a checked exception that wraps an exception thrown by an invoked method or constructor

Every case I have found report some kind of incompatibility between Eclipse and a module:

• VE (Visual Editor) with this thread, or that one, or this GTK64 SWT issue.
• bug 161621 (enum is a Keyword for Java5 and cannot be used as a Enum name), where the NewElement Wizard didn't reject enum as a class name on a 1.5 project.

In other words, this kind of exception is often the symptom of another issue.
The enum issue is a good example of such an incompatibility, but each time it can be a different problem related to the specific operations or configurations of the project.