During the development of an Eclipse plug-in, I wanted to add label decorations to a view.
The article Understanding Decorators in Eclipse is a good reference but I couldn’t make it work in my own plug-in. This article is omitting a key information: The label provider you want to decorate needs to accept decorations, it must be wrapped in a DecoratingLabelProvider.
For now, I haven’t found a way to find that information declaratively. So if you want to decorate a label provider provided by another plug-in, you have to browse its code to find out if it can be decorated or not.
As an example, to make my own ILabelProvider decorable, I had to change the code in my view from:
viewer.setLabelProvider(new MyLabelProvider());
to:
viewer.setLabelProvider(
new DecoratingLabelProvider(
new MyLabelProvider(),
PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getDecoratorManager().getLabelDecorator()));
With that change, I could contribute declaratively a lightweight decorator extension (i.e. in another plug-in) to this provider without any trouble.
