Migrating b3 from Xtext 0.8 to 1.0 nightly > M6

Until there is migration documentation, my experiences of migrating the Eclipse b3 project from Xtext 0.8 (~M4) to 1.0 nightly (> M6) may be of value to others. I did this by first migrating to M6, and then using the nightly - this so I had a state to roll back to in case the nightly would fail me completely.

Migrating to 1.0 M6 version

Merge of o.e.xtext.ui.common and o.e.xtext.ui.core into o.e.xtext.ui

Almost everything that was either in ui.common, or ui.core is now in just ui - all that is needed is to change the imports, and update any dependencies to the two merged bundles with the new bundle. (See below for some additional changes).

Label Provider

The label provider changed more than just being moved to ui.

import org.eclipse.xtext.ui.common.DefaultLabelProvider;
changed to

import org.eclipse.xtext.ui.label.DefaultEObjectLabelProvider;

and my label provider is now derived from this class instead.

Proposal Provider
References to
import org.eclipse.b3.ui.AbstractBeeLangProposalProvider;
changed to

import org.eclipse.b3.ui.contentassist.AbstractBeeLangProposalProvider;

New Structure
After running the mwe workflow, I got 4 new packages in my dsl project with the suffix ".ui". These packages contained the corresponding classes found in the existing packages without the ".ui" suffix. I moved/merged my code over to the new packages and deleted the old packages.

UI Module change
The UIModule for my DSL had to change to the following signature and constructor:

public class BeeLangUiModule extends org.eclipse.b3.ui.AbstractBeeLangUiModule {

public BeeLangUiModule(AbstractUIPlugin plugin) {

super(plugin);

}

The new structure has the UIModule in a new package (with ."ui" suffix), and the Activator (also in a new package "...ui.internal") uses the UIModule in this new package.

Mwe workflow change

I had to replace the JavaScopingFragment with ImportURIScopingFragment:

fragment class="org.eclipse.xtext.generator.scoping.JavaScopingFragment"

fragment class="org.eclipse.xtext.generator.scoping.ImportURIScopingFragment"

since the JavaScopingFragment no longer exist. Don't know if the ImportURIScopingFragment is what I want, but I had to pick one.

Converting Java Strings

Strings.convertFromJavaString now has an extra boolean argument useUnicode which should be set to true to process \\uXXXX escapes. (I did set it to true). I use this method in some terminal converters.

Changes in plugin.xml

A manual merge of all changes in plugin.xml_gen to my plugin.xml (basically changes related to use of "ui" in package names) was required.

Manifest change

Manifest file needed update as the activator is in a different package:

Bundle-Activator: org.eclipse.b3.ui.internal.BeeLangActivator

(using "ui" in the package name)

Migrating to latest nightly

The 42 Easter Egg

The method

protected void configureImportantInformation(IEditStrategyAcceptor acceptor)

has been dropped from DefaultAutoEditStrategy. It was only there to block an easteregg (typing 42 displays a funny comment about 'the meaning of life' - but the easter egg and method seems to both be gone in the nightly).

Serialization

I have not done much with b3 serialization yet, so required changes were small. I needed to add a single method:

public class BeeLangGrammarSerialization implements ITransientValueService

needs an implementation of the method

public boolean isCheckElementsIndividually(EObject owner, EStructuralFeature feature)

I added one that returns false, which hopefully is the same as the default.

Guice from Orbit

com.google.guice (from itemis) changed to com.google.inject from orbit (dependencies changed, and my launch configurations needed to be changed).

Open Issues

I had attached commands to the popup menu that should appear (and they did in 0.8 M4) over the editor's outline. But this stopped working. I am waiting on some wisdom from the Xtext gurus on this...
This was a temporary issue with plugin.xml changes not taking effect. After a restart and clean build it now works just like before.

Syntax highlight has changed, and I am trying to figure out how it works now... It stopped working because I forgot to move things over to the new UIModule (as described above).

Summary

All in all, the migration was quite painless. Knowing that changes were to take place in several of the services, I only have minimal implementations (the default, or just a few lines to fix something glaring) in many places (in wait for the 1.0 release and new documentation). If you have a lot of code and using everything "to the hilt" in 0.7.2, you may want to wait for the official release and the documentation.

I will update this article as I find more things that needs to be changed, or if I changed something in error.