Oomph 04: P2 install tasks

Form this tutorial onwards we are going to extend our project setup step by step. Today we are looking how to install additional plugins and features to our setup.

Source code for this tutorial is available on github as a single zip archive, as a Team Project Set or you can browse the files online.  

For a list of all Oomph related tutorials see my Oomph Tutorials Overview.

Step 1: Add the Repository

Open your Oomph setup file and create a new task of type P2 Director. To install components we need to provide a p2 site location and components from that location to install. So create a new Repository child to our task. When selected the Properties view will ask for a URL. Point to the p2 location you want to install stuff from. Leave Type to Combined. If you do not know about repository types you definitely do not need to change this setting.

When you are working with a p2 site provided by eclipse, Oomph can help to identify update site locations.

Step 2: Add features

Once you added the repository you can start to add features to be installed from that site. The manual way requires you to create a new child node of type Requirement. Go to its Properties and set Name to the feature id you want to install. You may add version ranges or make installs optional (which means do not throw an error when the feature cannot be installed).

The tricky part is to find out the name of the feature you want to install. I like to use the target platform editor from Mickael Barbero with its nice code completion features. An even simpler way is to use the Repository Explorer from Oomph:

Right click on your Repository node and select Explore. The Repository Explorer view comes up and displays features the same way as you might know it from the eclipse p2 installer. Now you can drag and drop entries to your P2 Director task.