Time for action – showing errors

So far, the code has been using an information dialog as the demonstration of the handler. There's an equivalent method that can be used to create an Error message instead. Instead of calling MessageDialog.openInformation(), there's an openError() that presents the same kind of dialog, but with an error message.

Using dialogs to report errors may be useful for certain environments, but unless the user has just invoked something (and the UI is blocked whilst doing it), reporting errors via a dialog is not a very useful thing to do. Instead, Eclipse offers a standard way to encapsulate both success and failure, in the Status object and the interface IStatus that it implements. When a Job completes, it returns an IStatus object to denote success or failure of executing the Job.

1. Introduce an error into the HelloHandler method run that will generate a NullPointerException. Add a catch to the existing try block and use that to return an error status. Since the OK_STATUS...