Generic Problems View

The purpose of this document is to present details of the solutions for the generic Problems view presented in Enabling Logical Model Integration in the Eclipse Platform.

Generic Views In the Eclipse Platform

There are several views in the Eclipse platform that have generic titles but only displays the elements associated with the Platform Resource model. For instance, the Problems view can only display prblems that are associated with file system resources. This forces other models to either associate their problems with file system resources or create their own view. There are several such views in the Eclipe Platform:

• Problems view: Displays the list of problems that exist in the workspace. Provides links to the resource where the problem exists and possible to one or more solutons (through QuickFixes).
• Bookmark view: Similar nature to the problems view.
• Tasks view: Displays a list of tasks the user should or could perform.Currently, tasks are tied to resources just like problems and bookmarks so a similar solution could be applied to the Tasks view. However, one could easily argue that tasks could be associated with multiple resources (or no resources). This makes generalizing Task related concepts more difficult than that of problems and bookmarks.
• Resource Navigator view: Displays the elements that exist in the workspace in a form that allows the user to navigate the workspace. There is work in the WTP project on a generic navigator and the rumor is that this may get pushed down to the Platform sometime after 3.1.

The Search view already has support for searches from different model domains. This comes in two forms:

• The Platform has pluggable support for search types. Some example search types are File Search, Java Search, Plugin Search and NLS Search. Each search type, when executed, adds a custom search result page to the search view.
• Some search types support participation. For instance the Java Search allows particpants to be added to Java searches.

The main issue in generalizing these views is determining the best way to combine the problems, tasks or elements from multiple models in the same view. There are two obvious ways to do this:

• show the problems, tasks or elements from all models in the same view.
  • This is the approach taken in the generic navigator proposal
  • Need grouping or filtering APIs to provide scalability
• provide a paged view where each page shows the problems, tasks or elements from a particular model
  • This is the approach taken by the Search view
  • Still needs grouping or filtering to deal with scalability

Each of these has their advantages and disadvantages. A single view frees the user from selecting which model to look at but such a view does not scale well. A paged view provides a means of top level filtering by model (advantage or disadvantage?) but can still have scalability issues. The nature of each particular view will dictate which approach is more suitable. This document focuses on the Problems view as it was identified in the scenarios presented in Enabling Logical Model Integration in the Eclipse Platform.

The Problems View

This view seems to be of most interest to modeling tools built on top of the Platform since it deals with helping the user correct model inconsistencies. For this reason, we will outline the beginnings of a possible solution here.

Based on several discussions on this topic, the following is a list of the desired properties of a generic Problems view.

• All the problems appear in a single view (i.e. not multiple pages) but are not tied to resource markers
  • Requires a generic problem API
• Support filtering
  • include/exclude problems from different domains
  • by severity
  • domain specific
  • selection
• Support grouping
  • arrange problems hierarchically. e.g. problems grouped by logical or physical resource
• Sorting
  • sorting across domains
    • severity
    • description
  • domain specific
• Actions
  • Goto action, Show in and QuickFix support that performs an action appropriate for the selected problem
• Efficient addition and removal of problems
  • problems may be removed/added one at a time or a domain at a time
• Display information appropriate for problem type
  • generic columns (severity, description, resource, path, location in resource)
  • allow user configuration of displayed columns (included domain specific columns)
  • support separate pane that shows details of selected problem or alternate views of the problem (i.e. problem dependency graph)

Status

Here is the status of this work as of 3.1 M5

Generic Views: This needs to be driven by model owners with help from Platform committers. Until model teams step forward and dedicate resources to this problem, it is unlikely that work will progress.