Shay Shmeltzer's Weblog

For a while I wanted to have a beginner guide for writing extensions to JDeveloper - just to show people it is rather a simple task.

So a couple of weeks ago someone on the forums mentioned that we didn't have a keyboard short-cut in JDeveloper that will just let you type a name of a file and then will automatically open it in the editor.
So I decided to pick this up and show how simple it is to add something like this to JDeveloper with an extension.

I created a very basic extension that will popup a list of all the files in your project once you press ctl+alt+Minus then you can start typing your file name - once you reach it in the list press enter and the file will open in the editor.

You can download the extension from here (or through the check for updates in the JDeveloper menu).

If you'll look into the jar file you'll see the actual java class that has the code for the extension.
It is very simple - one routine finds the file names.
The other routine adds the dialog to the JDev environment.

Feel free to improve this extension by changing the code.

Next on my plate is to do a little write up that will explain the steps for building up an extension.

By the way, when release 11 of JDeveloper will come out you won't need this extension any more - the feature will be built-in - and is already looking much better than my version.