Skip missing editor files when starting workbench

Question

The standard behavior of the Eclipse workbench is to preserve the set of open files between invocations, and attempt to reopen those same files on restart. If any of the files is missing, then a placeholder editor appears showing an error message about the missing file. We'd like to change the behavior of our Eclipse RCP application to just silently skip any missing files instead.

We're already writing our own IApplication, WorkbenchAdvisor, etc; these classes get to inject various behaviors into the platform, but I haven't found a way to accomplish these through these classes. How could we implement the desired behavior?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:34

The way I've handled this is actually in the editor being created: Override setInput to examine the IEditorInput being passed in for validity by calling editorInput.exists() (which, in the case of a FileEditorInput, checks to see if the file exists) or if you're using custom editor inputs, any other validation you need.

If the editorInput fails validation, then close the editor asynchronously (Eclipse doesn't like it when an editor closes before it finishes opening):

public void close () {
    Display.getDefault().asyncExec(new Runnable () {
        public void run () {
            getSite().getPage().closeEditor(YourEditorClass.this, false);
        }
    });
}

An alternative way of handling this issue is to just disable reopening the editors on startup - see In Eclipse, how to close the open files(editors) when exiting without auto-load in next startup

Skip missing editor files when starting workbench

1 Answers1