Team support
The Eclipse Team support defines API that allow plug-ins to
integrate the function of a versioning and configuration management
repository. The function provided by a repository fundamentally affects
the user workflow, since there are additional steps for retrieving
files, comparing their content with local content, versioning them, and
returning updated files to the repository. The goal of the team plug-in
API is to be passive enough to allow repository plug-in providers to
define their own workflow so that users familiar with their product can
use the platform in a similar fashion and provide support for workflows
that we have found are useful for team plug-ins.
This goal is accomplished by supplying several building blocks:
-
Repository Providers
A repository provider allows synchronization of
workspace resources with a remote location. At a minimum it allows
pushing resources in the workspace to a remote location and pulling
resources from a remote location into the workspace. A repository
provider is associated with a project and controls the resources in the
project by optionally providing a FileModificationValidator
and IMoveDeleteHook.
There is only one repository provider associated with each project. A
user associates a repository provider with a project by providing a IConfigurationWizard.
Repository providers can also participate in exporting and importing of
projects into the workspace via the team project set feature. To
support this a repository provider should implement a ProjectSetCapability.
-
Resource Management
Allows other plug-ins to indicate special handling of resources
with respect to team operations. The repository provider can mark resources
as team-private which essentially hides the resource from other plug-ins.
This is done via the
IResource#setTeamPrivateMember
method and is commonly done to hide repository provider specific meta-files
from the user. Also, builders will often mark build output as derived which
is a hint to a repository provider that the resource is transient and could
be ignored by the repository provider. A provider can check this flag on
a resource via the
IResource#isDerived
method.
In addition, other plug-ins can add provide hints to the repository provider
about file type information via the org.eclipse.team.core.fileTypes
extension and about common files that should be ignored by the repository
via the org.eclipse.team.core.ignore
extension.
-
Synchronization Support [new
in 3.0]
Synchronize support provides classes and interfaces
for managing dynamic collections of synchronization information (SyncInfo,
SyncInfoSet).
This support helps you manage information about variants of the
resources in the workspace. For example, with FTP you could store
timestamps for the latest remote file and the base for the currently
loaded resource. Synchronization support provides APIs to help manage
and persist resource variants and display synchronization state to the
user.
-
Support for Logical Model Integration [new
in 3.2]
The logical model integration support defines API that allows
logical models to participate in team operations. In model based views,
model providers can use this support in order to have team decorations and
operations appear on their model elements. In resource based views (e.g.
Resource Navigator), model providers can use this support to validate that
operations performed on resources will not corrupt the model and to ensure
that all the resources that constitute a model element are included in team
operations. For team merge operations, the API allows model providers to
use model semantics during merge operations and to participate in the preview
of merge operation. The description of the support for logical model integration
is divided into a
Repository Roadmap for Logical Model Integration and a
Model Roadmap for Logical Model Integration.
The UI support is also structured passively. Placeholders for
team provider actions, preferences, and properties are defined by the team
UI plug-in, but it's up to the team plug-in provider to define these UI
elements. The team UI plug-in also includes a simple, extendable
configuration wizard that lets users associate projects with
repositories. Plug-ins can supply content for this wizard that let
the user specify repository specific information.
Multiple repository providers can coexist peacefully within the
platform. In fact, it's even possible to have different client
implementations for the same repository installed. For example, one
could install a CVS client designed for experts and a different one for
novice users.