Bug 225036

Description Mark Finlayson 2008-03-31 23:44:29 EDT

Summary: The addition of global retargetable commands "Expand All" and "Collapse All", perhaps placed in the Navigation menu. Also the modification of tree-centered views in the IDE and JDT to register a handler for these actions (where appropriate).

Reasons: Many of Eclipse's views are tree-based, and already have their own proprietary expand all/collapse all functionality.  The number of times this is repeated argues for a central dispatch point.

I personally find myself hitting the "collapse all" button a lot in the Navigator and Java Package Viewer, as well as manually Expanding All in the Java Outline or Hierarchy Views.  A single keystroke to perform these tasks would be a great time saver.

Not too long ago I got so frustrated with continually expanding in the Hierarchy view that I made a little plugin in 3.1 that added these commands, and was able to get the Heirarchy view to respond to these handlers.  Unfortunately, I didn't maintain the plugin for later versions, and anyway, it all was a hack because a lot of the methods one needs to call are hidden in internal API, requiring reflection.  A better way to do this would be to integrate it more firmly with the IDE and JDT internals.