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Bug 288556

Summary:	Flexible resources
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	John Arthorne <john.arthorne>
Component:	Resources	Assignee:	Platform-Resources-Inbox <platform-resources-inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P4	CC:	aleguenn, caniszczyk, contact, daniel_megert, glen.anderson, irbull, KetanPadegaonkar, loskutov, mauromol, mlists, remy.suen, Szymon.Brandys, ykuo
Version:	3.5	Keywords:	plan
Target Milestone:	3.6
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Windows XP
Whiteboard:
Bug Depends on:	284148, 287238
Bug Blocks:

Description John Arthorne

2009-09-03 15:53:03 EDT

The Resource architecture that Eclipse uses has been criticized for being overly Java-centric and constraining for some use cases. The e4 incubator explored this problem and developed some concrete improvements to the resource model to address these problems. We will review and polish those changes and back-port them to Helios stream where appropriate.

Comment 1 Andrey Loskutov

2009-09-08 03:12:43 EDT

Nice to hear that we start to work in this area for 3.x stream.

There are also resource *markers* which I think should be made more flexible too.

See 
- Bug 22284 - Cannot add markers to non IFiles
- Bug 155379 - [Markers] Problems view redefinable default action depending on marker type

So what are deficiencies I see today:

 - currently we have IResource, IStorage, IFileStore, IFileInfo, but only IResource is supported by the most "standart" Eclipse markers views like Problems, Tasks etc. This is a huge problem, because you can't use your own "EFS" in-memory/network file system and attach markers to your custom "in-memory/network" resources (bug 22284).

- neither IResource nor IStorage nor IFileInfo has a nice support for a non-file (memory like or network-like) resources, because both of them are using IPath as "location" (IFileStore has toURI() method). Alltough many things can be translated to IPath, it is not really customizable (you can't use an URI with a query part, for example). It would be nice if IResource and IStorage (and so IFile) would support URI as a location, because with URI you can express almost everything. Having this, one could fix Bug 155379, see comment 5.

Comment 2 Szymon Brandys

2010-03-15 12:07:10 EDT

The work hosted on the e4 incubator was merged into the 3.6 stream, see Bug 284148. It introduced new features like Virtual Folders, Resource Filters and Dynamic Path Variables. 

They all are available to end-users via brand new UI dialogs, decorations and actions. Moreover there is new API and SPI available for Eclipse developers.

Numerous fixes and improvements were made in these new areas.