Hi Samantha,
I am in the process of evaluating XText for use in my product.
Before I start answering questions, I'd like to thank all the XText
committers and community for building such a cool technology. My
initial experience with XText has been very positive. Not only does
the sample work flawlessly, I can easily get my own dsl editor up
and running within a few days. It was very impressive.
Good to hear.
During my evaluation, I came across with a few things that I cannot
quite understand. I am hoping you can help me figure out the
answers. If this is not the right forum to ask these questions,
please let me know where I should send the questions.
Please use the TMF newsgroup for this kind of questions:
http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=27
I am using XText 0.8.0, and I am interested in some of the new
features for this release. The "New and Noteworthy" indicated that
there is a new builder infrastructure, and all files of XText
languages are indexed by this infrastructure. Can you explain to me
how this infrastructure work? How is indexing done, and what is the
relationship between the XText project support and the indexing (if
any?) ? Where can I find some design docs on how this works? Or,
if you can point me to the code to start looking at this, it will be
great.
The code can be found in the project (bundle) org.eclipse.xtext.builder.
It is basically an IncrementalProjectBuilder which reads and validates
resources on change and stores important information in the form of
descriptions.
We'll have a comprehensive documentation for the release in June.
Secondly, one of my requirements is to embed the XText editor into a
multipage editor. I experimented with this by programmatically
creating the XText editor in my multipage editor, and got the editor
to show up ok. However, none of the XText actions, like format,
open declaration, etc in the context menu. I added the same set of
actions by adding these actions in my own plugin.xml. The actions
will show up, but will not run, because some of the actions expect
the calling editor is an XTextEditor. The actions have hard-coded
casts to XTextEditor, and result ClassCastException when they are
run. I think the problem is that the XTextEditor is never designed
to be hosted in other editors,and therefore the actions do not
work. What are you thoughts on hosting the XTextEditor in a
multipage editor? Is this a supported scenario?
You may want to open a bugzilla (bugs.eclipse.org) so we can discuss
this further.
Finally, the language that I am dealing with is really a combination
of two sub-languages, much similar to Javascript in a JSP. I need
the editor to understand a different set of grammar depending on
what the user is writing in an application file. For example, if
the user is within some boundaries, the editor will interpret the
code using a set of grammar rules, everything else outside that
boundary will be treated as comments. If the user switches to
another part of the application, the editor will switch grammar on
the fly, and will interpret the code differently, i.e. building a
different AST tree, etc. The question is, is it possible to switch
grammar on the fly, maybe switching grammar if some tokens are found?
It's possible but not supported out of the box. Also the editor and
it's functionality usually expects one language (parser) per file. So
you might need to adapt /change a lot of functionality in order to get
this working.
Cheers,
Sven
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