One of the most important tips I have for beginning RCP developers is to please, please, please set up a custom target platform for your applications. As a trainer, it’s one of the first things I have students do. This is because target platforms are central to many other things we do as RCP developers, including the management of launch and product configurations. 

A target platform is simply the set of base plug-ins on which your application depends. By default, this target is set to be the entire collection of plug-ins shipped with Eclipse itself. So the first reason to set up a custom target platform is that the default is just messy. Why have hundreds of plug-ins in your target platform when you only need 20 or 30?

So setting up a target platform satisfies my sometimes excessive need for cleanliness, but there are other reasons as well. The best reason is that it decouples your application from the Eclipse development environment. Consider the following scenarios:

• You’d like to upgrade your Eclipse development environment to a milestone release, but you don’t want your RCP application to depend on beta plug-ins.
• You want to add GEF, EMF, BIRT or whatever to your application, but you don’t want to add it to your development environment.

In both cases, you’re out of luck if you’ve left your target platform defaulted to your Eclipse install. So save yourself some future headaches and set up a custom target platform.

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I tried to think of a snazzier title for this post, but I’m in a literal mood I guess. So have you ever faced this problem? You want to use the FormEditor class (or it’s new subclass SharedHeaderFormEditor), but you only have a single page.

Sure, you can use FormEditor with a single page, but you’ll wind up with a single tab at the bottom of the editor. It looks a bit goofy:

Well the solution is surprisingly simple. In your subclass of FormEditor, just override the createPages method like this:

protected void createPages() {
	super.createPages();
        if (getPageCount() == 1 &&
		getContainer() instanceof CTabFolder) {
            ((CTabFolder) getContainer()).setTabHeight(0);
        }
}

This code hides the tabs when there is only one page, and you wind up with this:

Note that you need to call the super method before resizing the tab height, or this won’t work.

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One suggestion I always make to developers getting started with the Rich Client Platform is to set up a research workspace containing all of the Eclipse IDE plug-ins. The Eclipse IDE (along with the PDE and JDT) is the ultimate RCP application and examining this code is the best way to learn how things should be done.

Are you developing a forms-based editor? Check out the PDE UI plug-ins to see how the Manifest Editor is constructed. Would you like to create a preference page with an unusual UI layout? Look through the many Eclipse IDE preference pages to find something similar. Then go look at the code.

I almost always have my research workspace open as I’m developing applications. It’s like having an RCP code encyclopedia! Follow these steps to create one:

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There are many parts of RCP that are a little rough around the edges. That’s to be expected in an open-source framework, and to be honest it’s one of the things I like about RCP. Sure, commercial frameworks are cleaner and packaged more “professionally”, but they have to give up a lot of functionality and dynamism to achieve this.

But once in a while I hit a problem that just makes me go ugh! (and grrrr!). One of the best examples of this is the fact that if you don’t give an editor an icon, your editor won’t show up. If you happen to have logging turned on (and if your launch configuration does not include the -consoleLog parameter, it really should), you’ll at least get a somewhat informative message on startup:

!ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 4 2007-04-30 15:37:05.037
!MESSAGE Plugin com.marketcontours.ui.builder, extension org.eclipse.ui.editors
Required attribute 'icon' not defined

But you may not understand the true importance of this message until you try to open your editor. At that point you’ll more than likely get a very unhelpful NullPointerException, as the editor registry will simply return you a null editor.

I probably shouldn’t admit this (being a trainer and all), but I’ve actually had this happen to me repeatedly, and for some reason it always takes me a while to figure out what’s going on. It may have something to do with my failing to believe that omitting an icon could have this kind of effect. Also, in every class I teach, there is at least one student that hits this problem and is completely dumbfounded. I’m going to assume based on this random sample that many beginning RCP developers run into this.

There is already a Bugzilla entry for this defect (it’s actually listed as an enhancement), if you feel like voting for it.

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