ETrice/Development/Tips and tricks

General Eclipse HOWTOs

Add Tracing to Your Plug-in

Add a file .option on the top level of your plug-in project. To this file add a line

de.protos.example/trace/data=true

This setting can be toggled in the trace tab of your launch configuration (it's also possible to edit string values there).

Here is the source code that uses these settings to enable trace messages printed to system log or standard out:

	private static boolean traceData = false;
 
	static {
		if (Activator.getDefault().isDebugging()) {
			String value = Platform.getDebugOption(
					"de.protos.example/trace/data");
			if (value!=null && value.equalsIgnoreCase(Boolean.toString(true)))
				traceData = true;
		}
	}

You may have to define an Activator class if it's not present yet. In the MANIFEST.MF make sure that the plug-in is activated when one of its classes is loaded. The Activator may be derived from AbstractUIPlugin and should in its minimal version look like this:

public class Activator extends AbstractUIPlugin implements BundleActivator {
 
	private static Activator instance = null;
 
	public static Activator getDefault() {
		return instance;
	}
 
	@Override
	public void start(BundleContext context) throws Exception {
		super.start(context);
		instance = this;
	}
 
	@Override
	public void stop(BundleContext context) throws Exception {
		instance = null;
		super.stop(context);
	}
}

Update the version information

Use file search for the old version with file names

MANIFEST.MF, buckminster.*, feature.xml, pom.xml

Then hit the Replace button, enter the new version and carefully inspect the changes in the preview.