Time for action – creating a preference page

Although preferences can be stored programmatically, users will typically change them through the user interface. The canonical way of presenting preferences is through a preference page in Eclipse, which can be accessed through the Preferences menu. A preference page implements the IPreferencePage interface, but the easiest way is to use the FieldEditorPreferencePage as a superclass, which provides most of the standard plug-in behavior needed, along with the IWorkbenchPreferencePage interface.

1. Open the plugin.xml of the com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui plug-in. To declare a new preference page, use the org.eclipse.ui.preferencePages extension point. Add the following:

   <extension point="org.eclipse.ui.preferencePages">
     <page name="Clock"
           class="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.ClockPreferencePage"
           id="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.preference.page"/>
   </extension>

   Note

   The same effect can be achieved by editing plugin.xml in the editor...