Adding more resource navigator filters to ColdFusion Builder (Eclipse)

One thing that has always bugged the crap out of me is our inability to add additional resource filters to the navigator view in Eclipse. Specifically, I mean these:

Resource filters are very useful little tools that will hide anything that matches the filter from the navigator view. Which is great for things like .svn folders or any other crap you don't feel like you need distracting you at the moment. Like if you want to hide all the images in a project so that it is not as cluttered. But for some reason, we have never been able to add our own filters. So I can't, for example, hide the stupid Settings.xml file that CFB likes to add to my projects or the .settings folder. Grrrrr!!

Now you might ask, "Jason, why don't you just use the .* filter to hide anything that starts with a .(dot)?", to which I would answer, "because that still won't hide Settings.xml AND I don't want to hide anything that starts with a dot. My .htaccess files are part of my application and I need them to be available.

So my solution was to dig around in Eclipse and find the damn setting I need.

I found it.

Depending on how you installed ColdFusion Builder and what version you are using will determine where you will find the file that we need. The file we need is com.adobe.ide.coldfusion.ui_1.0.0.274293.jar.

If you are on CFB 1 it will have a different name than if you are using CFB 1 Update 1. So just do a file search for com.adobe.ide.coldfusion.ui_1.*, that should find it.

As ALWAYS, make a back up of this file before we start messing with it. In fact, make a back up of your entire CFB install. I will not be held responsible when you go and hose this up ;)

Once you have made your backup, take a copy of the jar file and put it somewhere where we can work with it. I like the desktop. Rename it from a .jar to a .zip and extract the zip file to your desktop(remember, jar files are just zip archives). You should now have a new folder on your desktop. There are two files in this folder that we need to edit.

In plugin.xml you will find a block of xml that looks like this:

This is where we can define additional filters. So for each new filter, ad another <filter> block. Like this:

Notice I incremented the description number by 1 for each new filter. We'll see where that comes into play next. Really, I don't think this part is necessary, but I didn't feel like going back and testing it without doing the descriptions.

Once you have added all of the filters you want, open the plugin.properties file and look for this section:

This is where you define the text that will fill in the description block from the plugin.xml file. Add these (or similar) values

Awesome. Now we are ready to roll these back into the jar file, cause they don't do us any good on our desktops.

Copy the files into the plugins/ folder where you found the com.adobe.ide.coldfusion.ui_1.*. Then go to your command line and navigate to that plugins/ directory.

Then run this command:

The jar utility should report back to you that the two files were added. Next delete the two plugin(plugin.xml and plugin.properties) files from the plugins/ directory. We only needed them there temporarily.

Finally, launch Eclipse (You may need to use the -clean param the first time to get it to reload the plugins and catch these settings).

You should now have the new filters available.