II. Standard icons in the Eclipse Workbench

The Workbench plug-in from Eclipse offers a set of standard icons used in different places in the Workbench, such as in toolbars or as action icons in views.

You will almost certainly want to use some of these icons in your plug-in, particularly those used to represent Workbench resources like folders, files, and projects.

The getWorkbenchImage() method implemented by the SapIdeUtilImages UI class allows you to access these image resources easily.

public static Image getWorkbenchImage(String symbolicName)
	This method returns an image instance of a Workbench standard icon. To identify the image resource, symbolicName is passed as a string. This name is derived from the constant as it was defined in the Workbench interface ISharedImages. getWorkbenchImage() fetches these image instances from the share pool in the Workbench Registry. This means that they do not need to be released using dispose().

Procedure

1. Identify appropriate icons

The best way to identify icons is using the constant name specified in ISharedImages.

The screen shot below displays all these standard icons:

2. Create image instances

To create an image object, simply call the getWorkbenchImage() method from the UI Toolkit class SapIdeUtilImages. To identify the resource, specify the appropriate registry constant as a parameter.

Image myImage = SapIdeUtilImages.getWorkbenchImage(

ISapSharedImages.<IMAGE_REGISTRY_CONSTANT>);

Example

The following lines of code display three standard Eclipse icons as elements in a toolbar. The result looks like this:

myToolbar.addToolBarButton(SapIdeUtilImages.getWorkbenchImage(

ISapSharedImages.IMG_OBJ_FOLDER));

myToolbar.addToolBarButton(SapIdeUtilImages.getWorkbenchImage(

ISapSharedImages.IMG_OBJ_FILE));

myToolbar.addToolBarButton(SapIdeUtilImages.getWorkbenchImage(

ISapSharedImages.IMG_OBJ_PROJECT));