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I am currently working on a little Eclipse plugin and I have to deal with the classic 'plugin.xml' stuff, such as the creation of a nature:

<extension
    id="aplugin.natures.MyNature.NATURE_ID.id"
    name="Sample Project Nature"
    point="org.eclipse.core.resources.natures">

Now in this particular example, I must, somewhere in my plugin code, give this 'id' as a String to some Eclipse function. So I need to create a specific class like:

package aplugin.natures;

public class MyNature implements IProjectNature {
    public static final String NATURE_ID = "aplugin.natures.MyNature.NATURE_ID.id"; //$NON-NLS-1$
}

And here comes my problem, I got some copy and paste of my 'id'. I must admit that I am not very proud of it.

So my question is, does someone know a way to use the 'NATURE_ID' field in the 'MyNature' class directly in the 'plugin.xml' file ?.

In the end I wish to write something like:

<extension id="${aplugin.natures.MyNature.NATURE_ID}" ... >
Jasperan
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geoffroy
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1 Answers1

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That is not possible by design.

The idea is that the Eclipse core can load the plugin.xml files for all resolved plug-ins/bundles without loading/activating the plug-ins. Resolving your construct above would normally require Eclipse to resolve all references for the class - MyNature in this case - which can easily lead to the activation of many other dependent plug-ins. Not good.

So - by design - all data in plugin.xml must be self-contained. (With the possible exception of localized strings).

Tonny Madsen
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  • That a shame, i often forgot to keep my id synchronized. Perhaps i could do the inverse of my question like grabbing the id by doing some xslt magic on 'plugin.xml' when the class's field is build. But it look a more dirtier to me. – geoffroy Aug 05 '11 at 08:42
  • And in order to pick out many of the IDs... you need an ID... :-) – Tonny Madsen Aug 05 '11 at 14:49