[udig-devel] Drag and Drop / Plug-in dependencies

[Richard Gould <rgould@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Drag and drop is nearly complete.

I have created a class (LocalSelectionDragSourceAdapter) which can be 
used with any widget that supports selection. I have attached it to the 
Catalog and ProjectExplorer views. It can easily be attached to just 
about anything.

An issue that has arisen is that of dependencies. In order for the 
editor area to know what do to do with those selections as they come in, 
it needs to know about the ProjectExplorer itself.

Currently:
catalog.ui depends on udig.ui so it can load the image registry.
project.ui depends on catalog.ui for access to the CatalogTreeViewer, 
used in a couple wizards.
udig.ui needs to depend on project.ui for access to the ProjectExplorer.

I tried moving the image registry over to catalog.ui completely but ran 
into threading issues that I am not sure how to resolve. I am sure 
something could be done with the wizards accessing the 
CatalogTreeViewer, but the reuse there is really nice.

One of my instincts says that we should merge all the UI plugins into 
one single plugin. While coupling these plugins, it would allow 
everything to work quite smoothly. The printing UI would be able to hook 
into the global actions properly.

I had a quick look at the JDT.UI (Java Development tool) plugin for 
Eclipse and it seems that almost all of their UI is in the one plugin, 
with teh exception of debug.

I think I would normally be hesistant to do something like that, but if 
our main focus is "User-Friendly" I think this would be a good step to 
take.

Richard