General Plug-in Development Preferences

The Plug-in Development preference page provides global settings that control:

- The presentation of plug-in and feature labels in all PDE views, editors and dialogs
- The Automated Management of Dependencies workflow

Presentation Label Preference

By default, whenever a plug-in or a feature is presented in the UI (i.e. in the outline view, Plug-ins view, editors, etc.), the label shows the plug-in or feature ID followed by the plug-in or feature version.

The Presentation Label preference is a global setting that allows you to show an alternate label for plug-ins and features composed of the (translated) name of the plug-in or feature followed by the plug-in or feature version.

Automated Management of Dependencies Preference

With the Automated Management of Dependencies workflow, it is the user's responsibility to explicitly invoke the function that analyzes the plug-in code and generates the correct dependencies for the plug-in MANIFEST.MF file. Neglecting to update the manifests may result in class loading errors when testing the plug-in.

With the Automated Management of Dependencies preference selected, PDE checks all the manifest files in your workspace and makes necessary updates to the manifests prior to launching. This option is a great convenience, but it is off by default because it presents an overhead in the time to launch.