Domiclipse :: Developing a simple plug-in for Lotus Notes. Part 2

This is part 2 of a three part tutorial.
Part 1
Part 3

5. Testing the plug-in

• Click on the Run button

or select Run -> Run... from the main menu.
• In the Run dialog select Client Services and click on the New

icon.
• Expeditor will do most of the work to setup the new run configuration. All we need to do is name it Notes 8 instead of the default New_configuration and click on the Run button.

• Note. Only one instance of Notes 8 can be open at once. If you already have your 'real' copy of Notes 8 open the development instance will fail to launch with the following error.

• Once Notes 8 is open our new plug-in will show in the Sidebar. If it doesn't, select View -> Sidebar Panels -> Sample View from the main menu.

We have now written our first Lotus Notes 8 plug-in.

6. Customising the plug-in

Now it's time to make a few changes to the plug-in. We are not going to write any code but we will change the views icon and name.

• Close the development instance of Notes 8 and return to Eclipse.
• Double-click on plugin.xml file in the Project Navigator.
• Select the Extensions tab and expand the org.eclipse.ui.views extension and select the Sample View (view) entry.
• Change the value of the name field from Sample View to Tutorial 1.
• Change the value of the icon field from icons/sample.gif to icons/tutorial1.gif. Note: Images names are case sensitive.
• Save and close plugin.xml.

• Download this icon

, save it as tutorial1.gif and paste it into the icons folder of the plug-in.
• Click on the Run button

to test the plug-in in Notes.
• Here's how the plug-in looks now. Note the new icon and title.

Our plug-in masterpiece is finished. In the next section we will see how to package it so that it can be installed in the Notes 8 client.

7. Creating a Feature Project

This section will explain how to package our plug-in so that it can be installed into the Notes 8 client. We will create a feature plug-in, an update site and an update site database.

Earlier on in the tutorial we installed the Lotus Expeditor toolkit and I said that we were installing loads of plug-ins. That's only partly true. In Eclipse we never actually install plug-ins, we install Features. So, before anyone can install our plug-in we need to create a feature which will hold the plug-in.

• To create a new feature project select File -> New -> Other... from the main menu.
• Expand the Plug-in Development section, select Feature Project and click Next.

• On the Feature Properties page enter the name of the project. Give it the same name as the plug-in with .feature on the end and then click Next.

• On the References Plug-ins page select the com.domiclipse.tutorial1 plug-in and click Finish.

• The new feature project can now be seen in the Project Navigator view and feature.xml is open for editing.
• Select the Overview tab and change the Name of the feature from the default Feature Feature to Tutorial1 Feature.