View source for FAQ Can I create an application that doesn't have a data location?

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Yes you can, if you are very careful.  In Eclipse 3.0, the base Eclipse runtime was designed
to be able to run without any data location at all.  If you have a carefully
crafted RCP application, you might be able to get away with not having a data
location.  To launch an Eclipse application with no data location at all, use
the special <tt>-data @none</tt> command-line argument:
<pre>
   eclipse -data @none -application your.app.id
</pre>
If you do this, an error will occur if any plug-in attempts to access the
platform instance location, including the plug-in metadata location.
In other words, this configuration  makes sense only for a tightly
controlled application in which you are absolutely certain that the
instance location will never be used.  

One advantage of this approach
is that multiple instances of your application can run simultaneously without
forcing the user to pick a different data location for each one. For most
RCP applications, this type of configuration is too constrictive. A better
approach for applications that don&#146;t need to store any interesting state is
to pick a random location in a scratch directory, such as
the directory provided by <tt>System.getProperty("java.io.tmpdir")</tt>. This will 
ensure that your application does not fail if a plug-in is installed that does want
to access the instance location.


== See Also: ==

[[FAQ_How_do_I_specify_where_application_data_is_stored%3F]]

<hr><font size=-2>This FAQ was originally published in [http://www.eclipsefaq.org Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs]. Copyright 2004, Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. This text is made available here under the terms of the [http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html Eclipse Public License v1.0].</font>