Wizards

Overview

• Eclipse uses wizards in many locations and creating your own is easy.
• Wizards extend org.eclipse.jface.wizard.Wizard
• Certain generic wizards used in plugins such as the new file wizard define their own interface (org.eclipse.ui.INewWizard)

Wizards and wizard pages.

• You create an instance of a wizard. Wizards don't have anything graphical in them, they are simple containers for wizard pages.
• The wizard baseclass handles page navigation (back/next) and finish.
• When finish is clicked, performFinish() is called.
• Wizard pages extend org.eclipse.jface.wizard.WizardPage
• They incorporate visual elements; you can build them with SWT, Swing, AWT or anything else you like. We even tried Eclipse Forms.
• GUI creation ends up as boring/redundant as always; seems to be a lack of good SWT/Eclipse Forms WYSIWYG editors.
• Wizard pages can bring up problems that will be taken by the wizard to disallow the finish button until the problems are solved.
• Wizard pages don't know when the user presses next/previous/finish. It's your responsibility to query the pages (from the editor) in performFinish() if you need to read values, for example.

-- Main.JasonKealey - 11 Jul 2005