Verify User Intent Before Closing an Eclipse RCP Application

Have you ever accidentally closed an application only to lose all the data you were working with or abort some long running calculation half way through? On one particular application I was working on, it would have been devastating to accidentally close the application so I needed to add a dialog box that asked the user to verify that s/he really wanted to close the application. I've also used some applications before with this feature, and found it annoying when I was asked every single time whether or not I was really sure I wanted to close the application. Use it sparingly. The best solution would be to add a preference to the application where the user could decide if s/he wanted the reminder or not. I'll add a tutorial on how to do that soon. Anyway, It took me a while to figure out how to add a confirmation dialog box, but it's actually quite easy. Here's how...



Step 0: Create a Hello World Application.

Step 1: Add code to create the dialog box when the close application action is triggered. In the ApplicationWorkbenchAdvisor class that was automatically generated when you created a hello world application using the new RCP application wizard in Eclipse, you need to override the preShutdown() method. The method returns a boolean where, if true, the application will shut down, and if false, the application will continue running. You need to add code in that method that opens up a dialog box, gets user input, and returns what the user selected. Eclipse's JFace library contains a nice little class called MessageDialog where we can easily make a dialog box pop up, ask a question, and get the answer. We use the MessageDialog.openQuestion() method and pass it three parameters: a Shell, the dialog box's title, and the question we want to ask.

package com.blogspot.obscuredclarity;

import org.eclipse.jface.dialogs.MessageDialog;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell;
import org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI;
import org.eclipse.ui.application.IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer;
import org.eclipse.ui.application.WorkbenchAdvisor;
import org.eclipse.ui.application.WorkbenchWindowAdvisor;

public class ApplicationWorkbenchAdvisor extends WorkbenchAdvisor {

private static final String PERSPECTIVE_ID = "com.timmolter.helloWorld.perspective";

public WorkbenchWindowAdvisor createWorkbenchWindowAdvisor(IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer configurer) {
return new ApplicationWorkbenchWindowAdvisor(configurer);
}

public String getInitialWindowPerspectiveId() {
return PERSPECTIVE_ID;
}

public boolean preShutdown(){

Shell shell = PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getActiveWorkbenchWindow().getShell();
String dialogBoxTitle = "Question";
String question = "Are you sure you want to close this application?";
return MessageDialog.openQuestion(shell, dialogBoxTitle, question);

}
}

Step 2: Run the application and test if everything worked. Your application should now have a dialog box that verifies user intent when the application is closed and look something like this:


Piece of Cake!

Next ---> Add Nested Menu Items and Custom Actions to an Eclipse RCP Application
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Also see: Eclipse RCP Tutorial Table of Contents