An editor is a visual component within a workbench page. It is typically used to edit or browse a document or input object. The input is identified using an
IEditorInput
. Modifications made in an editor part follow an open-save-close lifecycle model (in contrast to a view part, where modifications are saved to the workbench immediately).
An editor is document or input-centric. Each editor has an input, and only one editor can exist for each editor input within a page. This policy has been designed to simplify part management.
An editor should be used in place of a view whenever more than one instance of a document type can exist.
This interface may be implemented directly. For convenience, a base implementation is defined in EditorPart
.
An editor part is added to the workbench in two stages:
- An editor extension is contributed to the workbench registry. This extension defines the extension id, extension class, and the file extensions which are supported by the editor.
- An editor part based upon the extension is created and added to the workbench when the user opens a file with one of the supported file extensions (or some other suitable form of editor input).
All editor parts implement the IAdaptable
interface; extensions are managed by the platform's adapter manager.
@see org.eclipse.ui.IWorkbenchPage#openEditor(IEditorInput,String)
@see org.eclipse.ui.part.EditorPart