Question

In my plugin, I have a pop up menu with menu item ‘X’ and I want to add submenu to this menu item

and the number and labels of menu items in the submenu and their action will change.

I think I can’;t do this from plugin.xml, so how to do this programatically?

Answer 1

In your plugin.xml, under org.eclipse.ui.menus, add a menuContribution that refers to the id of your “root” menu, i.e. the menu that you want to have your submenus attached to (in this case, menu:myDynamicMenuRoot):

<menuContribution
    allPopups="true"
    class="com.myCode.menus.MyDynamicMenuContributions"
    locationURI="menu:myDynamicMenuRoot">
</menuContribution>

Note that allPopups=”true” ensures that your submenus will be added to any menu with the id myDynamicMenuRoot that you add anywhere in your application.

Finally, create a class extending ExtensionContributionFactory, whose job it will be to create your dynamic submenu items. Here I add items based on commands I have defined in my plugin.xml:

public class MyDynamicMenuContributions extends ExtensionContributionFactory {
    private static final ImageDescriptor GREEN_STAR = Plugin.getImageDescriptor("icons/green_star.png");

    @Override
    public void createContributionItems(IServiceLocator serviceLocator, IContributionRoot additions) {
        // build a couple of command-based contribution parameters
        CommandContributionItemParameter pAA = new CommandContributionItemParameter(
            serviceLocator,
            "Submenu_CommandAA",
            "my.package.command.myCommandAA",
            SWT.PUSH);
        pAA.icon = GREEN_STAR;
        pAA.label = "Command AA";

        CommandContributionItemParameter pBB = new CommandContributionItemParameter(
            serviceLocator,
            "Submenu_CommandBB",
            "my.package.command.myCommandBB",
            SWT.PUSH);
        pBB.icon = GREEN_STAR;
        pBB.label = "Command BB";

        // create actual contribution items and add them to the given additions reference
        CommandContributionItem itemAA = new CommandContributionItem(pAA);
        itemAA.setVisible(true);
        additions.addContributionItem(itemAA, null);

        CommandContributionItem itemBB = new CommandContributionItem(pBB);
        itemBB.setVisible(true);
        additions.addContributionItem(itemBB, null);
    }
}