How to add a decorator to the splash screen of your RCP application?

I wanted to add a decorator to the splash screen our RCP application ‘Sigasi HDT’ to give our users a visual clue about which version they are running (beta, trial, …). After some digging and searching for the correct Google search terms, this turned out to be really simple. There is an extension for that: org.eclipse.ui.splashHandlers.

This extension point allows to contribute a splash handler in which you can add custom behavior to the splash screen. In this extension you have to specify a splashHandler and a splashHandlerProductBinding. In splashHandler you specify the class that implements the custom behaviour. In splashHandlerProductBinding you bind your splashHandler to your RCP application (you could also customize the behaviour of Eclipse’s splash screen).

For our product this is:

   <extension point="org.eclipse.ui.splashHandlers">
      <splashHandler
            class="com.sigasi.hdt.ui.SplashHandler"
            id="com.sigasi.hdt.ui.splashHandler">
      </splashHandler>
      <splashHandlerProductBinding
            productId="com.sigasi.hdt.rcp.product"
            splashId="com.sigasi.hdt.ui.splashHandler">
      </splashHandlerProductBinding>
   </extension>

The only thing left to do, is to implement the splashHandler (The quick fix in the Plugin Manifest Editor is a real time saver).

I extended the EclipseSplashHandler (org.eclipse.ui.internal.splash) and just overrided init to superpose a png image in top right corner.

package com.sigasi.hdt.ui;

import com.sigasi.hdt.HdtPlugin;

import org.eclipse.jface.resource.ImageDescriptor;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.PaintEvent;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.PaintListener;
import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Image;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell;
import org.eclipse.ui.internal.splash.EclipseSplashHandler;
import org.eclipse.ui.plugin.AbstractUIPlugin;

@SuppressWarnings("restriction")
public class SplashHandler extends EclipseSplashHandler {

	private static final String BETA_PNG = "icons/splash/beta.png";
	private static final int BORDER = 10;
	private Image image;
	
	public SplashHandler() {
		super();
	}
	
	@Override
	public void init(Shell splash) {
		super.init(splash);

		//here you could check some condition on which decoration to show

		ImageDescriptor descriptor = AbstractUIPlugin.imageDescriptorFromPlugin(HdtPlugin.ID, BETA_PNG);
		if (descriptor != null)
			image = descriptor.createImage();
		if (image !=null) {
			final int xposition = splash.getSize().x - image.getImageData().width - BORDER;
			final int yposition = BORDER;
			getContent().addPaintListener (new PaintListener () {
				public void paintControl (PaintEvent e) {
					e.gc.drawImage (image, xposition, yposition);
				}
			});
		}
	}

	@Override
	public void dispose() {
		super.dispose();
		if (image != null)
			image.dispose();
	}

}

See also