Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Extension point for running JUnit tests in a RCP Application instance?

One thing that has been on my wishlist is to be able to run the unit tests we have for Bioclipse from inside a running Bioclipse instance. That is, we have a Bioclipse Test Suite features on the update site, matching the functional features we have there. Each such test suite would run all JUnit tests we have for that feature.

The good thing about this is twofold:

  1. users can verify that their installation is working as intended
  2. the development team can easily run the test suite on foreign systems, without the need to install a fully operational Eclipse with Bioclipse development workspace
Now, the tricky thing is likely the following. How do we get to run all test suites? That is, I don't want to need to have to run the suites for each feature separately. Of course, this is exactly what extension points are for.

So, my question is, did anyone set up an system like this? And, is there an extension point that allows features to plugin additional JUnit test suites into a larger test suite dynamically?

Monday, September 7, 2009

New Plug-in Wizard template: Can I add Import-Package programmatically?

Dear Planet Eclipse readers, please take notice of my problem with adding an Import-Package to the MANIFEST.MF using the Plug-in Wizard templating mechanism. Any suggestions and pointers very much appreciated! I'd really like to remove step 7 from the following tutorial:

Last Friday, the Bioclipse 2.1 development series moved to Eclipse 3.5, so I had to update the Bioclipse SDK too, which we developed earlier.

With a new Eclipse version also comes new screenshots to talk you through the process of setting up a new Bioclipse manager plugin.

Step 1
Right click in your workspace navigator, and choose New -> Project:



Step 2
And select to create a new Plug-in Project:



Step 3
Give a project name, such as net.bioclipse.xml:



Step 4
Tune the ID, Version, Name, and Provider to your liking:



Step 5
Then select Bioclipse Manager:



Step 6
The next wizard page is specific the the Bioclipse manager, and asks a manager namespace, which will be used as prefix in the JavaScript Console. For example, if I make the namespace xml, then I will type xml.someMethod() inside the JavaScript. The default manager name is typically OK by default:

Then click Finish and let Eclipse set up the new project.

Step 7
Because I have not figured out yet how to add Import-Package to the MANIFEST.MF programmatically, you will have to do this manually. Add the last line of the next screenshot to the MANIFEST.MF of your new plugin:



Update: I found a hack to add the Import-Package programmatically, by overwriting the execute(IProject project, IPluginModelBase model, IProgressMonitor monitor) in the Template class.