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| <title>Stand-alone external tools</title> |
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| <h3>Stand-alone external tools</h3> |
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| <P CLASS="Para">For the ultimate in external tool flexibility, create a 'stand-alone' |
| external tool launch configuration. This is similar to the project builder launch |
| configurations discussed in the last section, except that it need have nothing |
| to do with project building, and you can explicitly run it whenever you choose. |
| Suppose you wanted to have a way to quickly see the contents of a .jar file |
| in your workspace using the jar utility. </P> |
| <ol> |
| <li>Select some .jar file in your workspace.</li> |
| <li>Select <b>Run > External Tools > Open External Tools Dialog...</b> from the workbench |
| toolbar.<br> |
| <img src="../images/Image616_et_dropdown.png" alt="External tools drop-down menu" border="0" > |
| </li> |
| <li>Select <b>Program</b> in the tree, then click <b>New</b>.<br> |
| <img src="../images/Image617_jar_inspector.png" alt="External tools dialog for jar inspector script" border="0" > |
| </li> |
| <li>Name the launch configuration 'jar inspector'.</li> |
| <li>Use the first <b>Browse File System...</b> button to locate the jar executable.</li> |
| <li>In the <b>Arguments</b> field, type '-tvf' and a space, then click <b>Variables...</b>.</li> |
| <li>In the Select Variable dialog, you will see a number of variables you can |
| pass as arguments to the program specified in Location. Select <b>resource_loc</b> |
| and click <b>OK</b>. </li> |
| <li>When this buildfile is run, the absolute path of the resource selected in |
| the workbench will be passed to the jar utility in the position specified. |
| </li> |
| <li>Click <b>Run</b>.</li> |
| <li>Notice that the buildfile sends the jar utility output to the Console view.</li> |
| <li>Select a different .jar file in your workspace.</li> |
| <li>Click the External Tools button in the toolbar. Notice the contents of this |
| jar are sent to the Console view as well. Now you have a quick and easy way |
| to see the output of the jar utility for any .jar file in your workspace.</li> |
| </ol> |
| <p>This example has only scratched the surface of what you can do with external |
| tools. The important things to remember are that you can create an external |
| tool for anything you can run on your system, and that you can pass arguments |
| to the external tool related to the current workbench selection. In many cases, |
| this allows you to loosely integrate tools that do not have corresponding Eclipse |
| plug-ins. </p> |
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