Package projectviewer.action

Creating custom actions.

See: Description

Class Summary

Class	Description
Action	An action defines an action to be taken when the user presses some menu item in the tree's context menu.
ActionSeparator	Small hack to enable a separator to be shown when some other action is also shown.
AddProjectAction	Action that when executed creates a new project.
ArchiveAction	Opens the search dialog for the selected directory/project.
CollapseAllAction	Expands all nodes of the current tree.
EditGroupAction	Action that when executed creates a new group or edits an existing one.
EditProjectAction	Action that when executed edits an existing project.
ExpandAllAction	Expands all nodes of the current tree.
FileImportAction	Action that when executed imports files into a node.
LaunchBrowserAction	Opens the selected file in the configured web-browser.
LaunchBrowserAction.Helper	Class to hold references to classes that may not be available, so this class can behave well when called from a BeanShell script.
MoveNodeAction	Action to move a project or group into another group.
NewFileAction	Action that when executed creates a new file under the current node.
NodePropertiesAction	Shows a dialog with properties for the selected node.
NodeRemoverAction	Action that when executed removes nodes from the trees.
NodeRenamerAction	Action for renaming files, directories and projects.
OpenCloseAllProjectFilesAction	Action that when executed opens/closes all project files.
OpenParentGroupAction	Action that when executed closes the current project.
OpenSelectedAction	Opens all selected file nodes.
OpenWithAppAction	Opens a file with a registered application, using PV-specified or desktop-configured file associations.
OpenWithEncodingAction	Opens a node in jEdit using a specific character encoding.
ReimportAction	Removes all the files below the root from a project, and then calls the initial project importer.
SearchAction	Opens the search dialog for the selected directory/project.
SearchAction.NodeFileSet	Implements a SearchFileSet representing files that are children of a given node and its children.
SetActiveAction	Action that when executed opens the project pointed by the selected node.
UpAction	A tree action that moves the selection up.
UpdateVCSStatusAction	Action that causes the current version control system to update the status of the node.
VFSBrowseAction	Show selected node in VFS Browser

Package projectviewer.action Description

Creating custom actions.

ProjectViewer allows other plugin developers too interact with the file trees by creating custom actions to be executed on the nodes. The actions are made available on the tree's context menu.

Creating a new action is very simple:

• Create a new class that extends Action.
• Implement the actionPerformed() method to execute the desired operations.
• In your plugin's services.xml file, add aen entry like the following:

  <SERVICE CLASS="projectviewer.action.Action" NAME="My Action Name"> code_that_returns_instance_of_action(); </SERVICE>

The menu item show in the context menu is provided by the getMenuItem() of the Action class. Subclasses are welcome to override this method to provide other kinds of menu items (a sub-menu, for example).

Before showing the menu item in the context menu, ProjectViewer will call the prepareForNode() method in all actions registered in the context menu. This allows each action to decide if it should be shown for the given node and what message to show, for example.

Another important thing to notice in the prepareForNode() method is that the actions should check is the node is of a certain type, and not if the node is not of a certain type. For example, use "node.isFile()" and not "!node.isDirectory()". This ensures that the action will not do anything wrong if a different node type is added in the future to PV, or if another plugin adds a custom node type to PV.

It's important to notice that the instance created by jEdit's ServiceManager is not the instance used by the viewer instances. Those instances are used as prototypes, and the viewers use clone() to get instances for the specific viewer. After the cloning, the setViewer() method is called, so the actions have a reference to the viewers where they are being used. This also means that you should not use the constructor of your Action implementation to instantiate GUI components. Instantiations of GUI components should be done lazily in the getMenuItem() method. The default implementation already does this, so you should only worry about this if you are overriding one of these methods.