Opereffa Eclipse Plugin

The Opereffa Eclipse plugin provides tooling support in Eclipse environment to perform the following basic functions:

  • Artifact generation: Generation of JSF artifacts (facelets) using ADL files as input.
  • Archetype structure browsing: An archetype view that outlines the structure of the archeypes in Eclipse development environment.
  • Access to openEHR documentation and knowledgebase: Using the nodes in the Archetype view, the plugin provides access to offline and online documentation.

What should be noted at this point is: the plugin is based on the existing implementation of Opereffa framework, so it can be used with the archetypes distibuted with Opereffa. If your archetypes do not use any other features other than these archetypes, you can also use the functionality

Installation

After downloading the plugin jar file from the Opereffa files section from Sourceforge page , simply put the jar file to your plugin directory under your Eclipse installation folder.

The plugins assume versions of Eclipse equal to or higher than 3.4.2, and they are developed and tested with Java 1.6. (If you need to use them in another setting, please let me know, and I can create other versions).

After the plugin is copied to plugin folders, and Eclipse is restarted, you'll notice a new menu named openEHR, with a new action on the toolbar that says "Generate JSF Artifact". These actions will be activated when you select an ADL file in your Eclipse workspace. Let's see what happens if you select an ADL file and click on one of these actions:
As you can see, you are asked to select a parent folder for the artifact that will be generated, and when you select a folder and click Ok, a new JSF Facelet is created with bindings to Opereffa framework. The newly created file is opened automatically in Eclipse environment.
These screenshots also show other features of the plugin in action, like archetype structure view and dynamic help. In order to have a convenient screen layout, you are advised to change your Eclipse preferences as follows. First open Eclipse preferences and change Eclipse's help setting as follows:
That is: open help contents in a browser, and open it in the editor area. The reason that this is recommended is, the documentation of openEHR would not fit into a view in Eclipse, so using the Editor field is better. Also, dynamic help and archetype outline should be visible at the same time, so you would not probably prefer to use dynamic help view for displayin help content also. Eclipse's default settings would show you what it is like to use these features in this not so useful way, so it is up to you to change them or leave them as they are.

After the help is configured, let's first display the archetype outline by selecting show view window menu and selecting Archetype Outline under OpenEHR category.
This should give you the Archetype outline that you've seen in previous screenshots. Finally display dynamic help window, by selecting dynamic help from help menu, and arrange the windows as you can see from the first screenshot (if you want to of course).

Now you'll see that whenever you click on an item in the archetype overview, the dynamic help is updated based on your selection, and when you select dynamic help topics, they'll be open in the editor area. Here is an example of dv_text documentation opened this way.
Check out the lower right part of the screen, where both dynamic and static help is available. Since Eclipse includes a browser, we can also display online resources like openEHR wiki or even the CKM. Here is how it looks from within Eclipse:
This is just a set of starting points for the kind of features Opereffa's tooling outputs are expected to have, but hopefully, with development of some of the pending items like CKM integration, and Opereffa's extending support for more of the openEHR standard, we should move forward quickly.