stealing the focus from a view in an eclipse rcp app

Question

I'm working on an Eclipse RCP app and I want to steal the focus from an embedded editor (which is just a fancy text field, actually) within a view, when starting an action from the same view's toolbar. That action works with a command. This editor/textfield loses the focus automatically, when the view itself loses the focus. So how do I steal the focus from the view?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is quite what you are looking for, but we use code like this when closing an editor or shutting down the application to "force-finish" a user's outstanding UI field edit so that validation and model update happen before dirty state is checked (so that we don't silently "lose" users' outstanding edits).

    final IWorkbench workbench = PlatformUI.getWorkbench();
    if (workbench == null)
        return;

    final Display display = workbench.getDisplay();
    if (display == null)
        return;

    final Control focusControl = display.getFocusControl();
    if (focusControl == null)
        return;

    focusControl.notifyListeners(SWT.FocusOut, null);

I don't know if this is the "best" or "proper" way, but it works, at least in 3.2.