Since the release of Eclipse 3.6 it’s been possible to open files in Eclipse from the command line. There are a few blogs that explain in great detail how this feature can be implemented. I however would like to show you the simplest way to make use of this feature in your RCP application.
My goal is to be able to execute ./myapplication the_path_to/afile.txt
on the command line to open a file in my running Eclipse application. We can achieve this quickly if the entrypoint of your application extends the IDEApplication
class. Unfortunately, IDEApplication
is not a part of the public Eclipse API, it’s a class in an internal package. I use it to get things working without having to write pages of code, you can replace it later with your own implementation.
There are two things left to configure.
First, you need to be careful with the name of your application and its executable. The appName
property in your plugin.xml
and the filename of your executable have to match. If the name of your executable is myapplication
(or myapplication.exe
on windows) then the appName
property should be capitalized, so it becomes Myapplication
.
<extension id="product" point="org.eclipse.core.runtime.products">
<product application="com.sigasi.myapplication.rcp.application" name="Sigasi">
<property name="appName" value="Myapplication" />
</product>
</extension>
Now you should be able to open files in your running Eclipse application using
./myapplication --launcher.openFile the_path_to/afile.txt
The last step is to eliminate the commandline option --launcher.openFile
. You can do this by adding the following snippet to the ini-file of your Eclipse application.
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
See also
- How to set the update description of RCP product updates (blog post)
- Build Eclipse documentation from wikitext with Maven Tycho (blog post)
- Dynamic menu items in Eclipse (blog post)
- How to implement "highlight matching brackets" for your custom editor in Eclipse (blog post)
- Update Tycho to 0.12.0 (blog post)