XWT
This feature is part of the extensibility of XWT. It provides a new possibility to specific a custom XML UI loader. Each UI loader must implement the inteface IXWTLoader. And the class XWTLoaderManager should be used to activate or desactivate a XWT Loader.
Control binding gets extended to support JFace viewer as data binding source. This feature enables JFace event handling completely in declarartive to synchronize with other UI's state.
For example, in the XWT version of e4 photo demo, MenuItem's property "enable" is bound with the selected item "singleSelection" in a ListViewer.
An external namespace is a namespace that is not handled by default by XWT loader. XWT loader takes care of only following namespace:
- http://www.eclipse.org/xwt
- http://www.eclipse.org/xwt/presentation
- Namespaces prefiexed by "clr-namepsace:"
All other namespaces are considered as external namespace and ignored by default.
In this release, an extensible mechanism has been introduiced to handle external namespace. Precisely, a INamespaceHandler for each external namespace must be registered via XWT class beforehand:
XWT.registerNamspaceHandler(String namepsace, INamespaceHandler handler);
The handler gets called when XWT loader reaches an attribute declared in the external namespace.
This solution can be considered as an annotation, which are used to associate user-defined information to XWT element.
The CSS integration gets improved in this release. The class selector of CSS is available. It relies in fact on "External namespace handling" mechanism. An external namspace is defined for CSS specification: http://www.eclipse.org/css. All attributes prefixed by this namespace will be handled by CSS namespace handler to set the corresponding information in the widget for CSS engine.
Here is the piece of CSS integration code used in XWT version of e4 contact demo:
<Composite xmlns="http://www.eclipse.org/xwt/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://www.eclipse.org/xwt"
xmlns:css="http://www.eclipse.org/css"
x:Class="org.eclipse.e4.demo.contacts.views.DetailsView">
<Label text="{x:Static c:Messages.General}" css:id="SeparatorLabel" />
...
</Composite>
A new plugin org.eclipse.e4.xwt.ui.workbench has been created in this release. It contains some common classes and tools to help the integration of XWT in e4 workbench.
Two wizards have been added in org.eclipse.e4.xwt.tools.ui to create e4 view parts:
- New e4 Static View Part
- New e4 Dynamic View Part
Static view part wizard is used to create a part whose content comes from a XWT resource file, which can be local or remote. Or Dynamic View Part wizard is designed to create UI dynamically via a class.
A converter is needed to convert data from Data Binding source to Data Binding target in case where their property types aren't compatible. By default, XWT data binding engine looks for a converter in registered converters in XWT.
This release supports the specification of a converter in the binding expression, which can be used only for this binding.
The data binding can be expressed in extension markup language in attribute value:
<Label text="{Binding Path=name, converter=y:MyConverter}"
or in pure XML:
<Label <Label.text> <Binding path="name"> <Binding.converter> <y:MyConverter/> </Binding.converter> </Binding> </Label.text> </Label>