UI - User Interface

Important parts of the UI are commands and menus, widgets, viewers and models, wizards, and dialogs.
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Overview of the UI parts

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Widgets

The widgets package contains all custom UI elements that are not part of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT). This covers a wide range from rounded composites to fully functional chat controls.
It is highly recommended for you to import the Saros Widget Gallery project (de.fu_berlin.inf.dpp.ui.widgetGallery) from your Git checkout in order to get an overview of the various applications of Saros' custom widgets.
You will find more information on Usability Guidelines.
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Dialogs

The dialog package contains some dialog classes that will pop up to inform the user like warning messages or the feedback dialog.
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Viewers and Models

JFace Viewers represent our domain model, namely the
  • buddy list,
  • an integrated view of the buddy list and the session, and
  • the workspace
The actual composites that contain these viewers are located in the widgets.viewer package. The model package contains the wrapped domain objects in order to be displayed by the viewers. They encapsulate the knowledge on what they should look like (especially the caption and the icon). The most important domain object representatives are the RosterEntryElement and the UserElement.
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Wizards

A wizard is a collection of several wizard pages and the logic of what to do if the wizard is finished or canceled. The wizard package itself contains all wizards whereas the sub package pages contains all wizard pages. Examples are wizards for creating a new XMPP Account, for adding buddies to the roster, for the invitation, for sharing projects, and many more.
Note: WizardUtils contains convenient methods for a simple and consistent start of wizards.
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Commands and Menus

A command is an abstraction of an action since it allows for multiple implementations depending on the content (e.g. copy is a command as multiple implementations exist depending on the currently opened editor). Another advantage is that commands can be embedded at the same time in different menus, context menus and toolbars.
Commands, commandHandlers and menus are declared in the plugin.xml file as the extension of the extension points org.eclipse.ui.commands, org.eclipse.ui.handlers, and org.eclipse.ui.menus.
The commandHandlers contain the implementations of commands that can be triggered by the user.
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