If your days are anything like mine – full of different activities in different areas of the software, and involving multiple tasks over the course of the day, you’ve probably wondered how to organize yourself. I’m a fan of keeping everything in one place, and this place for me is Eclipse. Beside the excellent programming tooling support in the IDE, Eclipse also offers various means to help you keep track of your workspace resources, projects and tasks.
Developing software often goes along with managing a lot of different files and projects in your workspace and development environment. There is the “client”- and “server”-related code, various database- and build-scripts, user documentation, generated resources, tests and test results, – and before you know it you’ve got more than twenty projects in your workspace. But Eclipse can easily help you to manage all these things – the “magic words” are
- (Window) Working Sets,
- Linked External Resources,
- and Tasks
Only a few clicks and you can bring into focus what’s currently important for your work:
(Window) Working Sets
I use Working Sets to categorize the projects within my workspace. Various Views support the usage of Working Sets, like the Package Explorer. Just select Select Working Set… from the Package Explorer View Menu and define your own categories for a bunch of projects:
You can define as many Working Sets as you want and also assign one project to multiple working sets. As well as assigning whole projects you can also select single resources from within a project to add to a Working Set.
That’s all it takes to start using Working Sets.
Defining and setting Working Sets this way is view specific – which means that each individual view can be configured as to which Working Set it should use. Most of the time this is not exactly what you need – focusing on a part of your workspace should affect all views at once. For this, the Window Working Set comes into play. By setting the specific view Working Set to Window Working Set you refer to a central preference for your active Working Set. Unfortunately this central preference is by default not visible – but it’s very simple to change: Just select Window → Customize Perspective → Tab “Command Groups Availability” (in Eclipse ≤ 3.4 it’s “Command”) → then select the command group “Window Working Set”. From now on you have got a new toolbar item in the main toolbar from which you can easily select the Window Working Set you currently want to work with.
As well as reducing the amount of visible projects, other advantages of using Window Working Sets, include being able to have more than one active Working Set at a time and the improved performance from the IDE (often a major advantage!). For example the JDT part of Eclipse also seems to be more focused and quicker when indexing and searching for classes. A minor disadvantage of using Working Sets is the storage of this information – they reside in your workspace metadata directory and are not that easy to share: <workspace>/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/workingsets.xml
Linked External Resouces
Another feature I use every day is the linking of external resources in my workspace. To link a resource, use the Advanced function when creating a new folder in your workspace:
I like using this feature e.g. for taking a quick look at our regression tests which run during the night, because you can use the well known Eclipse Tooling for these linked files like searching, filtering and working with the editing capabilities of Eclipse. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that linking many files into your workspace can easily lead to a poorer performance of your IDE.
Tasks
And last but not least I simply want to mention the integration of Mylyn in combination with bug tracking systems such as Bugzilla or Trac have been improved a lot and it’s real fun working with the Task List- and Task Repositories-Views. Hereyou can find detailed information on how to use Mylyn in your IDE.
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