Icons for sources and algorithms?

That would look cool indeed There are some icons for various data sources in the 2.x line web application:

http://carrot2.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/carrot2/trunk/carrot2/applications/carrot2-demo-webapp/web/skins/fancy/inputs/

I'm thinking – maybe it would be a good idea to expose icons via initialization attributes? If so, then @Init @Output would finally make some sense

Sounds interesting! This way the icons would be nicely decoupled from the applications, such as the Workbench or the web application. I'd try this approach out of curiosity

One major drawback of this approach: I would have to load component plugins, create instance and initialize every source and every algorithm just to get their icons and display Search View.

If, on the other hand, I'll add another attribute to Extension point definition, there is no need to load anything until it is really needed, namely when first query with this component is to be processed.

Yeah, Ula is right – especially class loading may take a while. On the other hand, Workbench may cache this information internally... it's certainly worth investigating.

Right now I'm working on http://issues.carrot2.org/browse/CARROT-184 and one of the conclusions is that passing back @Init @Output attributes is not easy/ clearly interpretable for the not-simple controller, which adds complexity to this otherwise nice concept

Forget it then, doesn't make sense to force it. Also, while implementing CARROT-184, I would really struggle for simplicity rather than premature optimization (this applies in particular to caching).

I'll do it then as an attribute in extension point definition. I think it should be required, so that every element in the combo has an icon. It would look really disturbing if some elements had it and some didn't.

I put first version to head. It turned out, that you cannot add images to standard Combo from SWT (I thought it possible). I found custom widget on this page http://www.richclient2.eu/2006_03_03/enhancing-the-combo-widget-with-images/ and used it, but it doesn't look the way I would hope it would.

I suggest the two of you take a look at that and tell me what you think. I could revert this changes if we decide it's not good enough.

The combo box doesn't look spectacular to me to be honest, so I'd switch back to the previous version. But adding data source-specific icons to editor tabs (currently we have a little carrot there) should still look good and nicely differentiate sources if more editors are open. But this is a minor feature anyway, not worth spending ages on it I guess.

This looks like something that can be implemented later on, similarly to Firefox's "Search tab" component – the icon is not part of the text box, but is next to it. It's of small priority, but can be fun to implement.

I reverted this image combo from Monday.

I looked closely at this Firefox 'Search tab', it looks like its context menu attached combo button. Might look better than images within combo box actually.

I changed editor icon to source-specific icon. Wasn't a lot of work.

Looks like this is done, resolving.