Description Hendrik David Post 2009-10-06 15:18:23 EDT

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.11; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; ffco7) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11
Build Identifier: 20090619-0625

Our group wants to modify the resource loading mechanism used to locate xpand and xtend files used by the editors.

Example:

extension fully::qualified::ExtensionFileName;

The corresponding file may (in our use case) be located in other directories than {any classpath entry}/fully/qualified/ .

Reasons why custom resource loading in the editor would be necessary / helpful:

At the moment, it is possible (and common) to modify the resource loading mechanism when invoking workflows programmatically. However, when writing script files for such use cases, it is not possible to use the same resource loading mechanism in the editor.

Thus, the custom resource loading mechanism can only be used for execution, but not for development of the scripts. For us, this means that we have to write the scripts without full editor support (no code completition because the editor throws exceptions on each failed source lookup, no error markers and so on).

The reason why custom resource loading is used in our setting, is that file locations change often and automatic updates of references cannot be achieved easily.

Rough implementation ideas:

- A new extension point for resource loading of files with a certain file extension.
- A refactoring of the "org.eclipse.xtend.shared.ui.resourceContributor" extension point in a way such that custom resource loading is supported.
- Probably, a setter for the org.eclipse.xtend.shared.ui.Activator modelManager attribute.

Possible workarounds:

- Implement modified editors
- Use a managed and modified Java classpath (This "works" in our use case.) 

 

Reproducible: Always