Eclipse Cookbook

13.5. Adding Items to a View

Problem

You’ve created a plug-in that supports a view, and you want to add items to that view.

Solution

If you’ve created the plug-in with a PDE template, just customize the initialize method.

Discussion

How you customize the items in a view depends on whether you’ve based that view on an SWT table or an SWT tree. In the example developed in the previous recipe, ViewPlugIn, our view was based on a tree. You create the tree structure under a TreeParent object named invisibleRoot in the initialize method of SampleView.java. The following code creates a tree of nodes in the view (note that in a real application, you’d build this tree to reflect your data model).

private void initialize( ) {
    TreeObject to1 = new TreeObject("Item 1");
               TreeObject to2 = new TreeObject("Item 2");
               TreeObject to3 = new TreeObject("Item 3");
               TreeObject to4 = new TreeObject("Item 4");
               TreeParent p1 = new TreeParent("Parent 1");
               p1.addChild(to1);
               p1.addChild(to2);
               p1.addChild(to3);
               p1.addChild(to4);
         
               TreeObject to5 = new TreeObject("Item 5");
               TreeParent p2 = new TreeParent("Parent 2");
               p2.addChild(to4);
         
               TreeParent root = new TreeParent("Root");
               root.addChild(p1);
               root.addChild(p2);
         
               invisibleRoot = new TreeParent("");
               invisibleRoot.addChild(root);
    }
}

This configures the tree object that will appear in the view. To make these items actually do something when clicked (with either mouse button) or double-clicked, see the following recipe.

See Also

Recipe 13.4 on creating a plug-in that supports ...