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Bug 150546

Summary:	[Preferences] filtering should use labels visible on filter pages
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	James Synge <james.synge>
Component:	UI	Assignee:	Platform-UI-Inbox <Platform-UI-Inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3	CC:	Tod_Creasey
Version:	3.2	Keywords:	helpwanted
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Windows XP
Whiteboard:

Description James Synge

2006-07-13 14:21:03 EDT

eclipse.buildId=M20060629-1905

As a user, the behavior of filtering in the Preferences dialog is quite mysterious.  For example, I wanted to enable the status bar feature that displays of the amount of heap memory used, but couldn't remember what it was called, so I typed "memory" in the filter, and no pages were selected.  I then typed "status", and got no pages.  I typed "heap, same result.  I needed to find the right page manually, which fortunately was the General page.  The only words that I could find select the General page are "background" and "general".

I'd like the Preferences dialog to "use" the text labels that appear on each preferences page as a source of keywords to be associated with each page.

Clearly we don't want to require the code for each preference page to be loaded and run before we can get this information, and yet that is also the way that
the labels are currently "associated" with the preference page.

Perhaps an extension point could be provided that associates a preference page with a group of messages (e.g. a prefix for the related messages in Workbench's messages.properties file), and this could be used to build the keywords list, rather than relying on the tiny list of keywords that are provided.

Vaguely related to bug 97439, [Preferences] preference filtering: allow more than one keyword

Comment 1 Tod Creasey

2006-07-14 08:45:07 EDT

See the org.eclipse.ui.keywords extension point. If you think a particular page needs a keyword please log a bugt to that component.

Comment 2 Tod Creasey

2006-07-14 11:02:08 EDT

The actual suggestion is to add keywords dynamically as pages are opened so I wll reopen. However I don't expect us to do this in the near future.

Comment 3 James Synge

2006-07-14 11:33:47 EDT

A possible approach to this problem is a PDE tool that makes it easier for the developer of a preference page to automatically extract the text on the page during development, and to place that text in the keywords extension.

There are two obvious problems with this approach: it requires the developer to take action, which is essentially the source of the problem in the first place (i.e. too few keywords), and localization (i.e. this action must take place for each language to place the keywords in the appropriate plugin.properties file).

These problems are why I was suggesting what amounts to a "convention"; i.e. if you name your externalized strings in a consistent fashion (i.e. all the strings for the preference page have names that share a common prefix, and that prefix is not a prefix of any other strings), then we can locate those strings based on a prefix appearing in a new keywords extension.

Comment 4 Tod Creasey

2007-03-19 16:25:35 EDT

There are currently no plans to work on this feature although we would be happy to review a patch.

Comment 5 Denis Roy

2009-08-30 02:18:11 EDT

As of now 'LATER' and 'REMIND' resolutions are no longer supported.
Please reopen this bug if it is still valid for you.