We all miss content assist support in Force.com IDE Visualforce editor. My previous attempt of using eclipse code templates was a patch to fill this gap. Good news now is, my colleague @AjayHada is creating a Visualforce editor, that will give decent code assistance support on typical “CTRL + SPACE” hit.
Meet @AjayHada !
Before we go any further, let me introduce you all with @AjayHada. He is a J2EE champ with a decade of experience in developing applications ranging from Supply chain management, ERP and Social Event management.
AjayHada’s experiences with Force.com IDE :-/
Ajay recently started learning and developing on Force.com platform. After a few days of flying in clouds, his major point of frustration was Force.com IDE, because of its well known limited capabilities. Being a Java guy by heart, he decided to write an Eclipse plugin to fill this long void, and he started an open source project for visualforce editor. After a few hours of research and RnD he was able to come up with an alpha version of this editor.
This editor is available on github here : https://github.com/ajayhada/Rich-VisualForce-Editor
Rich Visualforce Editor Plugin for Force.com IDE
This editor in its infant stage is supporting content assist for most commonly used visualforce tags.
How to launch ?
- Right click on any Visualforce page, to launch the popup menu.
- Select “Open With” menu item.
- In the sub menu select “Rich Visualforce Editor”.
Content assist in action !
CTRL + SPACE in action for tags
CTRL + SPACE assistance for tag specific attributes
Liked it, How to install ?
You can download this zip “rich.visual.force.editor.plugin.zip” from here. After download extract the zip and copy “VFEdit_xxxxx.jar” to “eclipse install folder/plugins”. Restart eclipse to reflect the changes.
Rich Visualforce Editor Roadmap & TODOs
Following are the features planned in next release. You are more than welcome, to fork and contribute to any of these.
- HTML5 tag support will be added to future versions
- Only applicable tags will be visible inside tags like apex:param will only be visible for applicable parent tags
- Display validation errors for apex and html tags
- Used attributes will be removed from the suggestion box.
- Suggestion box will also show some mark to show that tag is related to APEX, or HTML4, or HTML5
- Proper Tag, Attribute, Text, Comment color scheme
- Context sensitive help within IDE on pressing a hot key for visualforce tags.
- Support for “plugin update site” for all known pros.
- Support for dynamic update of tags and attributes, as per new Salesforce releases.
Help required from Force.com IDE team !
This plugin can be more awesome, if they can give us XSD/DTD for visualforce tags. This will help a lot in developing this editor in lesser time.
Your views and feedback !
Looking forward to those
11 comments:
Good to see this finally :)
Nice work.
Thanks @Aslam, glad you liked it.
I am not able to see the text editor after copying it to /.metadata/plugins directory.
Can you tell how I can see it after downloading
hi @p1-dfs, we need to copy the jar file in zip to "plugins" subfolder under "eclipse installation directory". Eclipse installation directory is one, where you will find Eclipse binary/executable.
great work @ajay and @abhinav...
Thanks @Gaurav, I will convey this to Ajay as well :)
I get this error when i press cntrl + space.
"Content Assist did not complete normally. Please check log for more information."
java.util.emptystackexception
How to receover content assist?
Tanujs, I will pass this to Ajay.
Tanujs, I never got this error, it might be possible that it occurred because of eclipse version. I am using eclipse 3.6. Also the message you mentioned in your post is from eclipse PDE.
I have uploaded a new jar in download section, why dont you delete previous jar from your "[$eclipse+home]/plugin/ folder and copy downloaded jar to plugin folder.
Thanks @ abhinav & Ajay. I copied the new jar and it works fine now.
Great, looking forward for your feedback and views !
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