[oXygen-user] selection plugin results to result pane?

[George Cristian Bina]

Hi Christian,

Sorry for the delay but I hesitated to get into this. Probably I am more 
comfortable working on a more concrete task.

You are right, an external tool will not see the selection.

A selection plugin can display any GUI he wants. What would be the 
advantage of having those in the results pane versus a plugin provided 
window or dialog? If the plugin is implemented to allow the user to 
modify the information it presents I see no problem to allow the user to 
change some of the entries from the database - beu this needs to be 
implemented by that plugin.

You may look for example at the Conversion plugin (contextual 
menu->Plugins->Conversion). That displays a dialog and allows the user 
to select different units of measure. Imagine that presents entries from 
an eXist database and it allows to also make changes in the database.

A content completion filter is an interesting extension and it can 
provide also annotations to the offered values. The annotations are 
presented next to the content completion window when a value is 
selected. This filter class receives the context the content completion 
is invoked in and the list of proposals oXygen is about to display. It 
should return the same or an updated list of proposals (adding, 
modifying or deleting entries). Each proposal is represented by a 
content completion item that contains mainly what will be inserted in 
the document, what will be rendered in the content completion window and 
the annotations that will be rendered next to a selected proposal.
You can use this extension to provide ID values as what will be 
inserted, then you can either provide also the values as what will be 
rendered in the completion list or some short descriptions if you have 
such info, then as annotations provide the complete descriptions of the 
entries.

Best Regards,
George
-- 
George Cristian Bina
<oXygen/> XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger
http://www.oxygenxml.com

Christian Wittern wrote:
> Hi George,
> 
> Thank you for your answer.
> 
> George Cristian Bina wrote:
>> Hi Cristian,
>>
>> There is no support for triggering something in the result pane from a 
>> selection plugin. However, it is possible to have an external tool 
>> output in a specified format that will result in an entry in the 
>> result pane.
> But I guess in this case, I could not trigger this tool in a way that 
> the tool has access to the selection?
> 
>>
>> We are considering also extending the plugin support in oXygen to 
>> allow more complex interactions between plugins and oXygen. It will be 
>> great if you can provide more details about the use case, what you 
>> actually want to solve, that will help us make sure that the 
>> extensions will cover also this.
> I think the classic use case is for a dictionary lookup.  If somebody is 
> translating something, or simply needs to look something up in a 
> dictionary for the tagging,  I would like to look this up in, for 
> example an eXist database, with the result popping into the result 
> pane.  Of course, more complex interactions could be desirable, for 
> example, what if I see a problem in the dictionary entry that is 
> displayed there and would like to edit it?
> 
>> It may be possible also to solve easily your use case with other 
>> functionality currently provided by oXygen. For example if what you 
>> want the lookup for is to providing content completion proposals then 
>> that can be implemented as a content completion filter that receives 
>> the proposals oXygen want to present, the context and returns back an 
>> updated list of proposals.
> I had thought about that, because another use case that prompted my 
> question was the lookup of xml:id targets for a reference.  In this 
> case, the problem was that if I include the dictionary or reference list 
> into the file and make it so available to oXygen, a simple list of 
> targets is not useful without annotation, thus the idea to have the 
> results show in the result pane.  In this case, the follow up action 
> would likely be to insert it into an attribute value, so maybe a 
> completion would be more useful?  But then one would need to think about 
> how to provide the annotation and filtering there.
> 
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Christian
> 
>