Question

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}" ... >

Answer 1

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).