E4/EAS/Status Reporting

When operations are initiated, whether by the system or by the end user, it is helpful to be able to provide the user with updates about the status of these operations. This ties in with the progress service in that status reporting is concerned with a customizable way of rendering status information to the user whereas the progress service is concerned with how the work is scheduled and whether status information should be rendered at all or not.

Eclipse 3.x API

The StatusLineManager and the 'Progress' view allows progress reporting to be done on it with some limited customization capabilities.

Critique

• The progress manager doesn't play well with wizards and dialogs
  • If you a run a job in a modal dialog, there is no jobs progress dialog and your only progress indicator is the status bar unless you happen to have the progress view open. There is no good way to redirect
  • If you want to show progress in multiple places, you have to wrap the monitor. If you are using jobs this means defining your own framework so you can intercept the monitor on the run method and wrap it.