Using XEclipse

Using XEclipse

In this section we will describe the XEclipse components, features and how to use them. We will use the XEclipse standalone version as the reference. Notice that all the functionalities are available in the plugin version as well.

XEclipse workbench

This is the workbench of the RCP application, as it appears during an XEclipse working session:

XEclipse could also be used in the Eclipse IDE. There is a custom perspective that can be used when editing wiki pages and that gives the IDE the same layout of the RCP application:

There are four main components in XEclipse:

• XWiki navigator
• XWiki page editor
• XWiki content outline
• XWiki preview

XWiki Navigator

The XWiki Navigator is the core component of XEclipse. It presents a list of connections to remote XWikis and provides a tree-oriented visualization of their structure in terms of spaces and pages .

If you are using the XEclipse plugin from the IDE you can show the XWiki Navigator by opening the Show view dialog (select the menu item Window->Show View->Other) and by selecting the XWiki Navigator under the XWiki folder

XWiki Navigator's toplevel elements represent XWiki connections. By expanding these nodes it is possible to navigate the content of each XWiki.

Double clicking on a page will open the editor for editing it. When a page is opened for editing, it is automatically cached locally. Cached pages appear with a small decoration representing a storage icon. By having the page cached enables the user to edit it even when the connection to the remote wiki is not available.

XWiki Explorer context menu

By clicking with the second mouse button on an element from the XWiki explorer tree, a contextual menu is shown. This menu is the entry point for almost all the functionalities that are available in XEclipse.

Menu items appear enabled or disabled, depending on the selected element.

XWiki Page Editor

The XWiki editor supports syntax highlighting and completion for the wiki syntax, links and API inside velocity scripts.

A content outline view is also provided in order to ease the navigation of very long documents.

XWiki Object Editor

The object editor allows the user to edit objects associated with a page, by filling the corresponding property fields.

Since many properties are supposed to be filled with wiki content, a bigger editor can be opened in order to make the edition more comfortable:

Objects can also be created by using a wizard:

A content outline shows all the available properties in the currently edited object and allows the user to jump to a given property directly.

Translations and versions.

By using the context menu it is possible to open a previous version of a page or to edit a translation.

Working sets

XEclipse supports the standard Eclipse working set mechanism in order to define a limited set of resources to be displayed when working with wikis that have a lot of pages.

Quick page opening

You can quickly open a given page by choosing the Open Page item in the edit menu or by using the CTRL+P combination. The open page dialog allows you to type page names by using wildcard in order to search for matching pages in the opened wikis. The shortcut associated to this functionality can be customized by opening the Preferences dialog using the menu Window->Preferences.

Conflict warning

When a page is edited with XEclipse nothing prevents another user to edit the same page on the remote server. This fact leads to a concurrent modification that must be handled. XEclipse is able to detect such a concurrent modification and, in the case when this actually happens, warns the user with a dialog and present about the remotely modified content and the current content. The user can then choose which version he wants to keep or do a merge of the two versions.

The user can also choose to solve the conflict later. In this case he can continue to edit the document and deal with the conflict when he's done (by clicking on the small icon on the top right part of the editor)

Element properties

By pressing Ctrl+Enter in the XWiki Navigator a dialog with information about the currently selected element is displayed. The dialog for the toplevel connections allows the user to modify connection parameters such as username and password.

Confluence compatibility

XEclipse can also be used in order to edit Confluence wikis.