Some Eclipse Foundation services are deprecated, or will be soon. Please ensure you've read this important communication.

Bug 370174

Summary:	The abstract class FileSystemContributor is vague about the filesystem browser that should be implemented
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Corey Ashford <cjashfor>
Component:	IDE	Assignee:	Platform UI Triaged <platform-ui-triaged>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	minor
Priority:	P3
Version:	3.7.1
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:	stalebug
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	365803

Description Corey Ashford

2012-01-30 17:45:55 EST

Build Identifier: M20110909-1335


Currently, there are three different extenders of org.eclipse.ui.ide.fileSystem.FileSystemContributor:

(1) An anonymous class in org.eclipse.ui.ide.filesystem.FileSystemSupportRegistry.defaultConfiguration

(2) org.eclipse.ui.ide.fileSystem.FileSystemContributor

(3) org.eclipse.ptp.remote.remotetools.ui.RemoteToolsFileSystemContributor

The abstract class doc doesn't say anything about what sort of files are to be browsed for, but apparently is intended, really, only to handle browsing for directories.

I say this because the only use I found for this class is during project creation, to be able to specify a location other than the local filesystem, and because the anonymous class in (1) only allows for selecting a directory (on Linux at least, ordinary files are still shown in the browser, but are grayed out).

The RSE implementation (2) allows for selecting remote files and remote directories, with no restrictions.

The Remote Tools implementation (3) allows for selecting only remote directories, and doesn't display the files at all in the browser.

This makes for an inconsistent interface caused, I think, by a lack of clarity in the documentation for the class.

Ideally, this class would be generalized into something that multiple clients could use.  It should provide filtering, and ability to select only directories or files or both.

Personally, at one point I was looking at this class as a possible candidate for a remote file browser capability that I am implementing for remote launch capability.  However, because of the restrictions on the class's visibility, I have decided to implement my class without making use of FileSystemContributor.

At a minimum, the documentation for this class should be improved so that it's clear that a browser which can only select directories is to be implemented.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
N/A

Comment 1 Lars Vogel

2019-11-14 03:16:32 EST

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.

If the bug is still relevant, please remove the "stalebug" whiteboard tag.