Question

I’m writing an Eclipse Plugin to do some simple code generation. I’m able to grab an IMethod representing the Method I need to modify, but I’m unsure how to actually write additional code in its body. I know this can be done with AST nodes, so is there a way to convert betwen IMethod and MethodDeclaration or something like that?

Answer 1

IMethod is a class of JDT’s Java model while MethodDeclaration is a node class of the JDT AST. The Java model has no connection to the AST. But you can use the model to create an AST, typically ICompilationUnit (represents a Java source file) is used, although creating an AST from a string is also possible.

I would suggest checking out this article

---

Edit:

Possibly "no direct connection" would have been the better wording. In the JDT FAQ is the following:

How to go from one of IBinding, IJavaElement, ASTNode to another?

[…]

From an IJavaElement to an IBinding

If you only need the binding key and not the binding object itself, look for a ‘getKey()’ method in a subtype of IJavaElement. This method returns the binding key, which can be useful in many situations e.g. see next point. Note that not all subtypes of IJavaElement have a corresponding binding, e.g. IType and IMethod have one but IPackageFragment and IImportContainer do not.

If you really need the binding objects you can use ‘org.eclipse.jdt.core.dom.ASTParser.createBindings(IJavaElement[], IProgressMonitor)’. Note that this operation is slightly expensive, compared to just getting the binding key, as the bindings have to be created.

From an IJavaElement to its declaring ASTNode

org.eclipse.jdt.core.dom.CompilationUnit.findDeclaringNode(String) – The string parameter is the binding key, see previous point.