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Bug 327959

Summary: An UI designer for IPreferenceStore
Product: [Eclipse Project] PDE Reporter: Nikolay Krasko <goodwinnk>
Component: UIAssignee: PDE-UI-Inbox <pde-ui-inbox>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: ankur_sharma, curtis.windatt.public, remy.suen
Version: 3.6   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard: stalebug

Description Nikolay Krasko CLA 2010-10-15 18:09:22 EDT 
Build Identifier: 20100617-1415

The one of the common task for for plug-in development is to configure plug-in options. Currently documentation (http://help.eclipse.org/galileo/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/guide/preferences_prefs_implement.htm) suggest to do it manualy with defining own constants and overriding initializeDefaultPreferences method of AbstractUIPlugin. 

But this is well automated task which can be done with visual editor and reduce ammount of typing significantly and will improve refactorings and maintaining the bunch of properties. For example there could be a tab on the plugin.xml visual editor with the title "Properties" where it would be able edit items of the list. Each item has name (valid java identifier), default value, description (will be a comment after generation) and type. Generator can generate not only identifier and initializing of the default values but also typed getter and setter. 

I understand that this an enchancement and it could become low priority task, but I think it should be done as important IDE task. Probably for JDT project either.

Also I should mention that Visual Studio has such feature (I can give more instruction how to see it in action or post screenshots if necessary) and that was the place of inspiration for that task.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
No reproduce steps
Comment 1 Ankur Sharma CLA 2010-10-17 14:42:39 EDT 
Generating may be simple but refactoring will be a challenge specially when the generated code has been modified.
Comment 2 Curtis Windatt CLA 2010-10-18 15:04:00 EDT 
Having a visual editor for this is a major request and would need strong community involvement to happen.  Preferences can be handled in different ways, so the feature would likely be unable to refactor existing settings.  A template showing how preference stores could be used might be helpful as well.
Comment 3 Eclipse Webmaster CLA 2019-09-06 16:08:10 EDT 
This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.
Comment 4 Julian Honnen CLA 2019-09-09 02:22:13 EDT 
Please remove the stalebug flag, if this issue is still relevant and can be reproduced on the latest release.