Eclipse RCP: Creating dynamic menu

Have you ever want to create a dynamic menu to your RCP application? Do you want to compute the contents of the menu on-the-fly at runtime? This is possible and many hacks can be done to do that.

But to do the correct thing is probably what annoyed your head every day. And actually, this has been supported by the framework.

First, what you need to do is creating a menu holder for your dynamic menu. This can be done by adding a new element named ‘dynamic’ under a menu contribution.

Now you need to implement a class that extends CompoundContributionItem.

Let’s make the menu like this;

public class ContributionItem1 extends CompoundContributionItem {

    @Override
    protected IContributionItem[] getContributionItems() {
        List<IContributionItem> menuContributionList = new ArrayList<IContributionItem>();

        menuContributionList.add(new CommandContributionItem(new CommandContributionItemParameter(Activator
                .getDefault().getWorkbench(), null, ActionFactory.QUIT.getCommandId(),
                CommandContributionItem.STYLE_PUSH)));

        return menuContributionList.toArray(new IContributionItem[menuContributionList.size()]);
    }

}

This is of course not a real example. In the reality, you will want to create a dynamic menu based on the condition. If the condition is changed, the menu will be automatically changed. I hope by using this small and unreal example, you will just get the idea.

Let’s try to run the application.

Great!