Question

How can I indicate syntax errors (e.g. an illegal sequence of tokens) in an eclipse editor plugin just like in the eclipse Java editor, i.e. by red wriggly underlines, a red marker on the scrollbar that you can jump to, and an explanatory message when you hover over either one?

I’m writing an eclipse editor plugin for a custom file format (specifically, the ‘snake file format’ of the Shark3D game engine). I have implemented a scanner to get syntax highlighting, and an outline.

• For the underlines, do I simply have the scanner return an IToken with a ‘wriggly underline’ TextAttribute instead of the normal one, or is there a specific mechanism for marking syntax errors?
• How do I implement the scrollbar markers? Is IAnnotationModel the relevant interface here? If so, where do I register the implementation so that the markers appear?
• I’ve only found SourceViewerConfiguration.getAnnotationHover(), which would allow me to implement the hover behaviour, but only for the ‘annotation’, which I suppose means the scrollbar markers – how do I implement the hover behaviour for the text itself?

I’d be happy specific advice as well as an URL of a tutorial that covers this – the eclipse help documents and examples don’t seem to.

Edit: Markers are the best solutions to this. A working example of how to use them can be found in the plugin example code in org.eclipse.ui.examples.readmetool.AddReadmeMarkerAction

Answer 1

You should be using Markers.

An example derived from ‘The Java Developer’s Guide to Eclipse’ follows:

<extension point='org.eclipse.core.resources.markers'               id='snakesyntax'               name='Snake syntax error'>       <super type='org.eclipse.core.resources.problemmarker' />       <super type='org.eclipse.core.resources.textmarker' />       <persistent value='true' /> <extension>  IMarker marker = res.createMarker('com.ibm.tool.resources.snakesyntax');  marker.setAttribute(IMarker.SEVERITY, 0); marker.setAttribute(IMarker.CHAR_START, startOfSyntaxError); marker.setAttribute(IMarker.CHAR_END, endOfSyntaxError); marker.setAttribute(IMarker.LOCATION, 'Snake file'); marker.setAttribute(IMarker.MESSAGE, 'Syntax error');