Monday, 26 September 2016

The extension point org.eclipse.team.core.filetypes

Most of my eclipse friends would have already come across the extension point "org.eclipse.team.core.fileTypes". But I wonder how many of them would have got it better. Although there is a little documentation here.

Lately, I see XText and various other OSS project promotes this by generating the extension point in the plugin.xml for the DSL's.

Some of the Open Source Community have developed eclipse plugins for various repository like GIT, SVN, CVS, etc. For instance EGIT is such implementation for GIT.

Handling various types of files which contains different type of data is cumbersome. It would be really nice, if EGIT knows a little detail about what kind of files/data it's dealing with. So that the data is handled appropriately and also can be transmitted little faster. The idea of having "org.eclipse.team.core.fileTypes" extension point is to make sure these providers understand the file types. So as a mutual handshake eclipse has provided this extension point and Repository Client providers knows how to consume them.

So defining extension for the file types we deal with in our project would be really cool.

I guess JDT plugin will have an entry like below, i have not verified but having this makes sense!
 <extension point="org.eclipse.team.core.fileTypes">
  <fileTypes extension="java" type="text"/>
 </extension>

Adding such extensions for the files you deal with will help both Client Providers and Repository Provider to deal with your data very efficiently.

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