Tag Archive for xmleditor at Spring IDE Blog

Tag Archive for 'xmleditor'

Adding Code Snippets in XML Editor

Published by Christian Dupuis 1 year, 8 months ago in Journal. 0 Comments

From my observation there are a couple features in Spring IDE that are being used very rarely, although I personally think that every one of them can become quite handy. I think that is because we haven’t promoted them and therefore most people don’t even know that they exist. This post is to introduce one very hidden feature.

Spring IDE installs a custom template category to the Spring Beans XML Editor. Out of the box Spring IDE adds a couple of common code snippet templates for inserting <bean />, <property /> and <constructor-args /> elements into Bean definition files. This snippets are available from the content assist proposals in the Beans XML Editor.

If you look around in Eclipse’ Preferences (Web and XML -> XML Files) you can find the Spring Beans XML Templates preference page. On that page you can modify and delete existing XML templates as well as create your own.

As you can see on the following screen shot, Spring IDE’s Web Flow support already installs templates for inserting <flow:executor /> and <flow:registry /> elements.

Anybody out there using this? Do you want us to include some more pre-definied templates? Which?

Introducing Spring IDE’s Web Flow XML Editor

Published by Christian Dupuis 1 year, 9 months ago in Journal. 0 Comments

Since this morning (nightly build version 2.0.0.v200702221647) Spring IDE contains a first version of an XML editor extension that supports the flow namespace in the Beans XML Editor and - more importantly - the Web Flow flow definition file format.

If you are working with Spring Web Flow make sure to install that build and provide some feedback. As usual the build is available from our nightly build updatesite.

Here is a quick list of supported features:

action bean name completion <action bean="..." />
bean-action bean name completion <bean-action bean="..." />
action method completion (follow action method signature) <action method="..." />
bean-action method completion (public methods, setters will appear, but with less priority) <bean-action method="..." />
state id completion for transition target state <transition to="..." />
type completion for the several attributes that take Java class names <var class="..." />, <transition on-exception="..." />
hyperlink navigation to Spring bean definitions, action methods and target state transitions

More, like the graphical editor and a validator, will follow over the coming weeks. Stay tuned. Also don’t miss the Beans Cross References View.

Editor support for Spring 2.0 and the p namespace

Published by Christian Dupuis 2 years ago in Journal. 0 Comments

After reading Rod Johnson’s blog entry that introduces a shortcut syntax for specifying Bean properties, I thought that it is about time to give an update on our progress to support Spring 2.0 features in Spring IDE’s Beans XML Editor.

At this year’s SpringOne Rod Harrop first showed me the shortcut syntax and I immediately thought that people will want support for that in their favorite IDE. I prototyped the support for this in the Beans XML Editor a couple of days after SpringOne and forgot about it. Until reading Rod’s post…

Therefore I’m able to provide a preview for this nifty feature right away. The Beans XML Editor will provide content assist for adding p: attributes.

For attributes that are suffixed with -ref - indicating a bean reference - the editor will provide content assist proposals for bean references.

This support will be part of version 2.0 of Spring IDE. If there is some demand I should be able to release a developer preview of the editor, that supports Spring 2.0’s AOP and the p namespace, around The Spring Experience later next week.

Beans XML Editor and Spring 2.0 namespaces

Published by Christian Dupuis 2 years, 6 months ago in Journal. 0 Comments

I spent some time this weekend to prototype the integration of the different namespaces which will be part of Spring 2.0 into Spring IDE’s Beans XML Editor. It is about finding an elegant way to support the different namespaces with content assist, hyperlink navigation and hover information which are part of Spring Framework, but also about defining an extension mechanismn for custom namespaces to hook into Spring IDE. The extension mechanism will be realized as a set of Eclipse Plugin extension points that can be implemented by you, as a plugin and custom namespace developer. More to come on that pretty soon…

As a first result of the new abstraction layer in Spring IDE, I can present you a screen shot of basic support for the </aop:* > namespace. You can see the content assist for the aspect bean reference and the AOP definitions in the Outline.

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