The new Project Explorer view that is part of the Beta Developer Perspective has been created using the Eclipse CNF (Common Navigation Framework) standard. The current definition is the following:
▪ The BetaDevExplorer viewer (associated to the new BetaDevExplorer view) defines a new set of menu insertion points in order to be able to control and filter the contributions to the menu context depending on the selected resource:
▪ It also defines the pattern of the extensions that will contribute to the viewer content, either to provide the content as well as filtering it. Any navigation content or common filter whose id matches the included patterns will be called when creating the viewer contents:
▪ Finally, it defines the pattern for the action providers that are allowed to contribute with actions to the view context menu.
In our case, we are allowing all actions that are currently contributed to the Java EE perspective project explorer to also contribute to our view (org.eclipse.ui.navigator.resources.* actions pattern); additionally we have defined new action providers, with id following the pattern com.ibm.btt.tools.projectexplorer.*, that add new actions or override the behavior of other contributed actions. All these actions are contributed to the view context menu.
The viewer can be also contributed by any other actions or action sets defined as extensions in any other plugin available in the runtime environment. These are the contributions that appear in the ‘additions’ insertion point. This area can be added or removed completely if required by setting the property allowsPlatformContributions to true or false
By default, it is set to true and the actions that appear in that insertion point area are controlled using the org.eclipse.ui.activities extension point. Some of the defined activities are shown below:
In the ‘Project Explorer Context Menu’ section you will find more details about how the current contributions are added, removed or filtered depending on the selected resource in the view.