Cheat Sheet Extensibility

I've been looking at the Eclipse Cheat Sheet capability recently - with a view to using it more as a workflow assistance tool, rather than a "follow these instructions" helper.
As such, the idea of crafting specific tasks that the user can interact with seems an appealing idea.
Here's a screen shot of a simple first attempt.


Note that I've used the Eclipse Forms controls to blend in with the "flat look" layout.
This was pretty easy to get going:

1. Define a task extension in your plug-in.
   

   <taskEditor
   class="mypdeproject.tasks.MyTaskExtension"
   icon="icons/sample.gif"
   id="MyPdeProject.taskEditor1">
   </taskEditor>
   

   
   
2. Define the class referenced above. It needs to implement org.eclipse.ui.internal.provisional.cheatsheets.TaskEditor
   
3. Implement the required methods. The main one of which is the createControl method - to create the UI controls used to edit the task.
   

   public void createControl(Composite comp, 
        FormToolkit toolkit) {
   
    form = toolkit.createForm(comp);
    form.setText("Hello, Eclipse Forms");
   
   }

   Obviously, you may want to define a few more fields in there than this.
   
4. Define a complex task, and then reference our newly defined task extension.
   

   <task id="t2" kind="MyPdeProject.taskEditor1" 
     name="Extended task" 
     skip="false">
     <intro>
      Introduction Extended
     </intro>
     <onCompletion>
      This is the Conclusion
     </onCompletion>
   </task>

And that's it! Simple really.
Next, I'll take a look at how you can use task variables to communicate between your tasks.