Plugin demo project export error[bug]

[TigerGod]

1、create plugin project

2、export project directly

3、click finish button

4、error occured and the export dialog doesn't hide.

the error log content is this :

I'm so confused.It worked good in about version 2024-3.

[TigerGod]

and the Launching Part is Empty.

[TigerGod]

the reason may be this:

product definition previous is set as plugin and feature,and now i set it as only plugins,and config it in content part,and i also config the configuration part.

now i can export without error log.
but when i run the exported .exe,the problem is this:


but i have import the Jakarta packages.

so what should i do?

[TigerGod]

so there are several bug:
1、Launching part is empty.
2、if product definition is configured as plugins and features ,the export will fail.It only works under only plugins.
3、Jakarta packages can not be resolved.

[ejDeister]

Thinking about taking on this issue. Could you expand on what you mean by this?
"product definition previous is set as plugin and feature,and now i set it as only plugins,and config it in content part,and i also config the configuration part."

[ejDeister]

@HannesWell Was this fixed? I just tried replicating the first four steps on my end, but no errors occurred and the dialogue box simply "flashed" as if something happened, but in reality nothing did. If it's not causing any errors on your end, maybe my team could add a small popup or warning that tells the user why the action isn't allowed? Any pointers here?

[nburnwal09]

I was checking this issue and looks like it is explicitly supposed to throw error while trying to export both plug-in and features together. Attaching the code snippet for the same

So I have few suggestions to make it better for user experience:

1. We could remove/hide the option altogether for checkbox(plug-in and feature) which will give a cleaner UI look with all the working options available.
   @HannesWell Could you please checkout the options here and give your inputs

And in case, we want to keep that checkbox in the UI
2. We could gray out the finish button in the export dialog for the same.
3. Or once user clicks on finish, we could show error message in a cleaner way(the same error as show in above case MIXED: Exporting mixed products is not (yet) supported) along with the parent errors in another error pop up dialog, so user understand that both plug-in and features can not be exported together.

[TigerGod]

I was checking this issue and looks like it is explicitly supposed to throw error while trying to export both plug-in and features together. Attaching the code snippet for the same我正在检查这个问题，看起来在尝试同时导出插件和功能时明确应该抛出错误。附加相同的代码片段

So I have few suggestions to make it better for user experience:所以我有一些建议来改善用户体验：

1. We could remove/hide the option altogether for checkbox(plug-in and feature) which will give a cleaner UI look with all the working options available.我们可以完全删除/隐藏复选框（插件和功能）的选项，这将提供更简洁的 UI 外观和所有可用的工作选项。
   @HannesWell Could you please checkout the options here and give your inputs您能否在此处查看选项并给出您的意见

And in case, we want to keep that checkbox in the UI如果我们想在 UI 中保留该复选框 2. We could gray out the finish button in the export dialog for the same.2. 我们可以将导出对话框中的完成按钮变灰。 3. Or once user clicks on finish, we could show error message in a cleaner way(the same error as show in above case MIXED: Exporting mixed products is not (yet) supported) along with the parent errors in another error pop up dialog, so user understand that both plug-in and features can not be exported together.3. 或者，当用户单击“完成”后，我们可以在另一个错误弹出对话框中以更清晰的方式显示错误消息（与上述案例中显示的错误相同：不支持导出混合产品）以及父错误，以便用户了解插件和功能不能一起导出。

I think the first solution you proposed is better, this way will have a better user experience, disallowing certain operations in advance will reduce unnecessary redundant operations, i.e. if the user operates a certain number of steps before they can see that they can't export both the plugin and the feature at the same time, then the user may wonder why they can't export both at the same time.

This leads to a new question, what if the user creates a project that wants to export both plugins and features at the same time? So a better way is in the user to create the project stage, give the user a choice of intent, that is, through the configurable pop-up window to show the user to create the project supports all the exportable configuration options, or just pop-up window prompts all the exportable configuration options, so that the user will be in advance to control their own project can be exported to what things, to give control to the user rather than the programmer's later maintenance.

I don't think Eclipse's internal errors are what users or developers want to know about, it's just an issue that Eclipse developers want to collect, so I don't think it's desirable to throw out errors in any way, even though every plugin has its own internal errors, Eclipse and these plugin vendors shouldn't be able to show them to the user by way of error alerts.

Although I know Eclipse itself is not a specialised product like MyEclipse, it still has product attributes of its own, Eclipse is designed for developers, but developers are also users, and with the current advances in AI, developers can now become more of a black-box user, so a developer using Eclipse would probably want a more more automated experience , so will not pay attention to Eclipse and third-party plug-ins within the error prompts , but hope to have a direct solution to the problem , or even say that I hope Eclipse itself through the background tasks to provide some solutions will be directly solved or give some tips to give some automated configuration . I think you can collect those bugs submitted by past users and use AI technology to achieve this automation function I proposed. Problem-solution data pairs, if there is some kind of problem, then through Eclipse internal AI, give the reason for this problem and possible solutions. It would also be possible to expose interfaces to third party plugin developers, allowing them to also use Eclipse's internal AI to train their own plugin's problem-solution data pair models, just like ChatGPT allows multiple users to have their own models. This is my simple idea, just for reference.

[HannesWell]

I was checking this issue and looks like it is explicitly supposed to throw error while trying to export both plug-in and features together.

That's correct, but is only the case when exporting a mixed product using the PDE-build workspace export.
Building a mixed product using Maven+Tycho works perfectly fine.

3 Jakarta packages can not be resolved.

This probably happens because the PDE-build workspace export doesn't support the automated inclusion of dependencies, which again is supported by Maven+Tycho.
In general using Maven+Tycho to build Eclipse Products, Plugins or Features is the recommended way as PDE-build is not actively maintained anymore and lacks support for the most recent features.

So I have few suggestions to make it better for user experience:

1. We could remove/hide the option altogether for checkbox(plug-in and feature) which will give a cleaner UI look with all the working options available.
   [@HannesWell](https://github.com/HannesWell) Could you please checkout the options here and give your inputs

And in case, we want to keep that checkbox in the UI 2. We could gray out the finish button in the export dialog for the same. 3. Or once user clicks on finish, we could show error message in a cleaner way(the same error as show in above case MIXED: Exporting mixed products is not (yet) supported) along with the parent errors in another error pop up dialog, so user understand that both plug-in and features can not be exported together.

As mentioned above mixed products are generally supported, just not by the PDE-build workspace export (unfortunately). So the radio-buttons should stay.
And in fact the export-button on the top-right corner is already disabled for mixed-products with a corresponding explanation in the tool-tip:

But looks like you found a loophole using the export menu. :)

So what could and should indeed be done is to disable the Finish button in the product Export dialog if one tries to export a 'mixed' product. Additionally one could set an error-message for the dialog with a similar text as the tool-tip of the disabled export-button. I assume it's not possible to just disable the Eclipse product entry in the export dialog and just removing it wouldn't allow us to give some context: