The Lucy framework provides a support class, ALcyApplicationPaneTool
, for add-ons that need to show a user interface panel in the Lucy application. It allows you to show and hide the user interface
panel with a toggle action in the menu. The add-on only needs to define the content of the user interface panel. The ALcyApplicationPaneTool
then inserts the toggle action into the menu bar to control the visibility of the panel, and adds the workspace support so
that the visibility of the panel is saved in the workspace, and restored from it.
Notes
ALcyApplicationPaneTool
offers support for exactly one application pane. If you need multiple application panes, you can create multiple instances
of this support class. However, if you don’t know the number of application panes in advance — because the user can create
new ones at will, for example — you cannot use this support class, because its plugInto
method must be called when the add-on is plugged in.
When you are creating multiple instances of this support class, the long prefix used to configure each instance must be unique
across the complete Lucy application. This means that you cannot use the ALcyTool.getLongPrefix
method to generate the long prefix for this tool, because the long prefix generated by that method depends on the java package
only. You can use ALcyTool.getLongPrefixWithClassName
instead.
Furthermore, ALcyApplicationPaneTool
does not provide a hook to save extra properties in the workspace. If you need to save extra properties, store them using
an extra ALcyWorkspaceCodecDelegate
. A simpler alternative is storing them using the workspace preferences of an TLcyPreferencesTool
. For more information, see Working with the preferences tool.