I am developing a plugin in eclipse which can generate a text file (based on user input) and can trigger a perl script. I can easily make a simple plugin (like Hello World) and I can add new menus and commands to it. I understand how those things are related to one another, but the place where I am getting stuck is the User Input.
How can I ask the user to enter his choices? I mean what extension point should I use to ask him out? I can’t find anything that can ask the user to enter data. Once I can get him to enter the required info, I can easily access that information to proceed further.
PLZ. NOTE: this is my first time in an online community, so I have tried to be as thorough as possible in my description. I am new to eclipse and have a very basic knowledge of Java. I took some Java lessons online by Mark Dexter. I do have a solid understanding and work experience in C++.
Continued from my comment above (sorry, couldn’t fit into the 600 character limit for comments, so I’m adding this as a possible answer to your question) — A quick search led me to this – http://www.eclipse.org/articles/article.php?file=Article-action-contribution/index.html. You can use actions to easily add toolbar buttons, menu items, etc, that are handled by your plugin. In short, this is how you plug functionality into the workbench. I recommend checking the link above to gain a better understanding. As for collecting the input, you can use a JFace dialog (http://help.eclipse.org/indigo/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.platform.doc.isv%2Freference%2Fapi%2Forg%2Feclipse%2Fjface%2Fdialogs%2FDialog.html). There are many pre-canned dialog that you may find useful, so I recommend doing a little more research to see what will work best for your use case. Good luck!