Recommenders/Attic/Templates

Introduction to Templates Completion

This page will soon contain in-detail information about the Code Recommenders Template Completion plugin and how it can be used, maintained and extended by developers.

For the rest of this introduction we will present a short scenario which helps the developer to understand the major tasks and possible obstacles. In the following we will present the general #Architecture of the plugin by giving an overview of its components in #Components Overview and how they interact in #General Workflow. We will further explain the most #Important Concepts which further helps understanding the system and are vital to know for working on the plugin.

Functionality

Here we will give a short illustration about the main goals of this plugin.

Default Eclipse SWT template for a new button

${buttonType:newType(org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Button)} ${button:newName(org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Button)}= new ${buttonType}(${parent:var(org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite)}, ${style:link(SWT.PUSH, SWT.TOGGLE, SWT.RADIO, SWT.CHECK, SWT.FLAT)});
${button}.setLayoutData(new ${type:newType(org.eclipse.swt.layout.GridData)}(SWT.${horizontal:link(BEGINNING, CENTER, END, FILL)}, SWT.${vertical:link(CENTER, TOP, BOTTOM, FILL)}, ${hex:link(false, true)}, ${vex:link(false, true)}));
${button}.setText(${word_selection}${});
${imp:import(org.eclipse.swt.SWT)}${cursor}

The task of this Plugin is to dynamically construct such templates depending on the context, i.e. depending on at which position completion was triggered (e.g. Button b<^Space>) and what has already been done with the observed variable, and the information about frequent patterns in such a context, as obtained from other Recommenders components.

Architecture

Dependencies between components

This section will contain a general overview about the whole plugin and how its components interact. First, a diagram describing the structure and the dependencies between the components is displayed on the right. Second, each component of the Plugin is given along with a short description. Finally, the default sequence of components interaction is displayed.

Components Overview

This subsection will give a short description of each component and display the dependencies between them.

Table of Plugin components and short description of their roles.

Package / Class	Description
.templates	Main components of the Plugins, control interaction.
CompletionProposalsBuilder	Transforms PatternRecommendations into IJavaCompletionProposals which are applied on the editor content when the propoals is selected from the completion proposals menu.
CompletionTargetVariableBuilder	Extracts the CompletionTargetVariable from an IIntelligentCompletionContext.
PatternRecommender	Computes PatternRecommendations from the CallsModelStore.
TemplatesCompletionModule	Prepares the Plugin by injecting dependencies.
TemplatesCompletionProposalComputer	Controls the process of template recommendations.
TemplatesPlugin	Stores the Plugin's instance while it is started.
.templates.code	Components for transforming our information into Eclipse templates code.
CodeBuilder	Builds Eclipse templates code from a list of method calls on a given variable name.
MethodCallFormatter	Generates the String representation of a MethodCall.
MethodFormatter	Generates the String representation of an IMethod.
.templates.types	Encapsulates certain information. Only used by this Plugin.
CompletionTargetVariable	Models the variable on which the completion was triggered.
JavaTemplateProposal	Extends the TemplateProposal to customize the style of the template's entry in the completion popup.
MethodCall	Models a call of a certain method on a given variable name.
PatternRecommendation	Encapsulates one recommendation received from the models store.

General Workflow

In this subsection we will illustrate how the components interact when responding to a completion request.

Important Concepts

This section will consider how the most important components work in detail.

Target Variables

This subsection will explain what information we need for template proposals in how it is encapsulated.

Pattern Recommender

Here we will explain how the pattern recommender communicates which other plugins of the code recommenders system to obtain relevant patterns.

Code Builder

This subsection will shortly illustrate how Eclipse templates work and how we generate them from our mined patterns.