Time for action – using other field editors

The FieldEditorPreferencePage supports other types of field editor. These different types of editor include BooleanFieldEditor , ColorFieldEditor , ScaleFieldEditor , FileFieldEditor , DirectoryFieldEditor , PathEditor , and RadioGroupFieldEditor . Add a sample of each of these types to the ClockPreferencePage page to find out what they can store. Perform the following steps:

  1. Open the createFieldEditors() method of the ClockPreferencePage and add the following code at the bottom of the method:
    addField(new BooleanFieldEditor("tick","Boolean value",getFieldEditorParent()));
addField(new ColorFieldEditor("colour", "Favourite colour",getFieldEditorParent()));
addField(new ScaleFieldEditor("scale", "Scale",getFieldEditorParent(), 0, 360, 10, 90));
 addField(new FileFieldEditor("file", "Pick a file",getFieldEditorParent()));
addField(new DirectoryFieldEditor("dir", "Pick a directory",getFieldEditorParent()));
addField(new PathEditor("path","Path","Directory",getFieldEditorParent()));
addField(new RadioGroupFieldEditor("group", "Radio choices", 3,data,getFieldEditorParent(),true));
  2. Run the Eclipse instance and go to the Clock preference page. It should look similar to the following screenshot:
    Time for action – using other field editors

What just happened?

This change added different types of standard field editors provided by the JFace package, to give a flavor of the types of data entry element that can be shown.

Some of the editors are specific to the kinds of entry points that are used in Eclipse itself, such as file, directory, or path editors. Others are more general such as colour, scale, boolean, or radio choices.

The values are persisted in the preferences format in a text values, appropriate to the data type. To see where the values are written to, go to the runtime-EclipseApplication/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.prefs file. The contents look similar to the following code:

colour=49,241,180
eclipse.preferences.version=1
favourite=Europe/Milton_Keynes
group=Europe/Milton_Keynes
launchCount=28
scale=78
tick=true

The persisted colour value is stored as a red/green/blue triple, while the boolean value is stored as a true or false value.

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