Metadatas

MetaDatas are a ways to add informations on elements to filter actions depending on their value. Metadatas can be defined in the FileProperties associated xith a tab.

Metadata compatibility

Several methods in the FileProperties and the FileProperties class allow to check the compatibility of a FileProperties with a MetaData:

• FileProperties.isCompatibleWith(MetaData) return true if the FileProperties is compatible with the MetaData. Only the keys of the MetaData to compare must match
• FileProperties.isCompatibleWith(MetaData, boolean) return true if the FileProperties is compatible with the MetaData. If complete is false, only the keys of the MetaData to compare must match. Else all the keys in the two MetaDatas must match

Not comparable keys

You can define at the static level a list of keys which should not be used when comparing MetaDatas. The associated method is MetaData.setNotComparableKeys(List)

Example

Suppose that we have two file types:

   MetaData textFileMeta = new MetaData();
   fileMeta.put("fileType", "text");

   MetaData imageFileMeta = new MetaData();
   fileMeta.put("fileType", "image");

We have a plugin where we want to open a text editor on the selected tab. We can use the following code to allow to open the editor only if the tab contains text:

  public void openEditor(FileProperties properties) {
     if (properties.isCompatibleWith(textFileMeta)) {
       ... open the text editor
     }
  }