Bug 140175

Description Oleg Besedin 2006-05-04 11:08:50 EDT

I would like to add the following information to the Eclipse 3.2 Plug-in Migration FAQ (Platform Plug-in Developer Guide -> 3.2 Plug-in Migration Guide -> Migrating to Eclipse 3.2 from 3.1 -> FAQ). 

Please feel free to correct language and style:
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Clarification of the usage of IDs with dots (“.”) in Extension Points, Extensions, and Content Types

In the past, IDs specified for the extension points, extensions, and content types were expected to be “simple IDs” with no dots in them (e.g., “myPoint”, not “my.Point”, not “myPlugin.myPoint”).

In the release 3.2 we added processing of fully-qualified IDs (e.g., “org.eclipse.myPlugin.myPoint”). However, it turned out that some components used IDs with dots and the change broke the functionality provided by those components. To preserve backward compatibility for IDs of extension points and extensions, we added special processing based on the version of the XML file:

•	If XML file has tag <?eclipse version="3.0"?>, the runtime functionality remains the same as before (plug-in ID is added to the simple name)

•	If XML file has tag <?eclipse version="3.2"?>, the IDs with dots are treated as fully qualified names (no plug-in ID is added to the name)

Details can be found in the bug https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=128866.

We recommend switching to the 3.2 format as the usage of IDs with dots was never intended to be supported in the 3.0 format. (Simply put, there is no guarantee that it really works today or that it will work the same tomorrow.)

The <?eclipse version>  tag applies to extension point IDs and extension IDs, but not to the content type IDs (see bug https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=139491).