Category Archives: Eclipse

Eclipse plug-in & RCP stuff

Removing P2 from RCP

Leave a reply

Recently I was struggling with a problem having to do with the headless build of my RCP application.

For some reason the P2 update function was being included in the build application, even though I never specified it as a requirement for the feature or plug-in.

The result was, when the user clicked on the Installation Details button on the applications about box, the tabs for “Installed Software” and “Installation History” were shown … but they were both empty.

After a lot of web searching I was unable to find a way to exclude the P2 feature & plug-in’s from my application.

My suspicion is that one of the other plug-in’s or feature’s that I’m using has p2 as a requirement.

Icons for RCP

Leave a reply

When building an Eclipse RCP product, you have the ability to generate a native executable.  By default the icon associated with the executable is the Eclipse graphic.

There’s an option in the product definition (‘.product’ file) that lets you use your own icons.

There are two ways to attach the icons …

  • Six different BMP files – 16×16, 32×32, & 48×48 at 32 bit & 8 bit depths.
  • A single ICO file with all six graphics included.

I was struggling with creating the graphic files I needed.  I had no problem getting the 32 bit version of the files created, but couldn’t figure out how to create the 8 bit version.

Continue reading →

Including a JRE in a headless build

Leave a reply

There appears to be a known issue in the headless build facility that results in a built RCP product not having a JRE (even though the product configuration indicates there should be one).

If you do an export from the Eclipse UI, you do get the JRE included.

After a fair amount of digging I figured out how to resolve this problem.

First … you need to have your product based on features.

Next, modify your features build.properties file to include the following line …

root.win32.win32.x86.folder.jre=absolute:${java.home}/

This will cause the generated build script for the feature to copy the JRE that is executing the compile into the jre directory of the product.

Obviously this entry is specific to Windows 32bit compiles.

Export RPC — File In Use

Leave a reply

I was trying to use Eclipse 3.6 to manually export a RPC using on a Win7 x64 system but kept getting the following error:

C:\Users\myuserid\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.pde.core\temp\org.eclipse.pde.container.feature\build.xml:103: Failed to copy C:\eclipse\configuration\org.eclipse.equinox.app\.manager\.tmp31587.instance to c:\test-app\eclipse\win32.win32.x86\eclipse\jre\configuration\org.eclipse.equinox.app\.manager\.tmp31587.instance due to The process cannot access the file because another process has locked a portion of the file

The file .tmp31587.instance was indeed locked … apparently by the eclipse instance that I was currently using.

So it appeared that the export function was trying to copy a file from the live Eclipse instance.

My solution was to move the configuration directory for the live eclipse instance to my personal home directory.

The eclipse product was installed in C:\eclipse … so I copied “C:\eclipse\configuration” to “C:\User\myuserid\eclipse\configuration” and then changed the shortcut I use to launch eclipse to include the parameter “-configuration C:\Users\myuserid\eclipse\configuration”.

Now, when I launch eclipse, and export the RPC … it doesn’t try to copy a file that’s in use, since the configuration is no longer in the eclipse application directory.

Wrap JLabel Text

4 Replies

It took a bit of experimentation, but I think this routine could be used to allow a Java JLabel component to contained wrapped text.

This routine depends on the ability for JLabel text to contain HTML.

Basically it iterates through each word in the JLabel text, appends the word to a ‘trial’ string buffer, and determines if the trial string is larger than the JLabel’s container. If the trial string is larger, then it inserts a html break in the text, resets the trial string buffer, and moves on to the next word.

private void wrapLabelText(JLabel label, String text) {
	FontMetrics fm = label.getFontMetrics(label.getFont());
	Container container = label.getParent();
	int containerWidth = container.getWidth();

	BreakIterator boundary = BreakIterator.getWordInstance();
	boundary.setText(text);

	StringBuffer trial = new StringBuffer();
	StringBuffer real = new StringBuffer("<html>");

	int start = boundary.first();
	for (int end = boundary.next(); end != BreakIterator.DONE;
		start = end, end = boundary.next()) {
		String word = text.substring(start,end);
		trial.append(word);
		int trialWidth = SwingUtilities.computeStringWidth(fm,
			trial.toString());
		if (trialWidth > containerWidth) {
			trial = new StringBuffer(word);
			real.append("<br>");
		}
		real.append(word);
	}

	real.append("</html>");

	label.setText(real.toString());
}