Eclipse Working Set

Eclipse is a popular IDE for programming. We have known conveniences and utilities of this IDE. This article will show how we work with Eclipse Working Set.

What is Working Sets?

Working sets group elements for display in views or for operations on a set of elements. (Eclipse Documentation)

Eclipse allows programmers create or import plug-ins to their projects. Big projects have tens, or hundreds different plug-ins. However, we do not always work all with them at one time. Plug-ins could be grouped by purposes, tasks on projects, for examples, database plug-ins, GUI plug-ins, etc. Working Sets will help us to select and display whatever plug-ins that we want without affect to the whole system.

Create a working set

Create a working set on Eclipse is pretty easy. Assume that we have some plug-in displaying on the Package Explorer.

Step 1: Click on the small downward triangle (View Menu) and click Select Working Set.

Figure 1: List of project

Step 2: Click the New button to create a new Working Set if you do not have. In case that you already have working set, you could choose them on this step and hit OK.

Figure 2: Create a new working set

Step 3: There are several types of working sets like Resources, Breakpoint, Java …Here we choose Java and hit Next.

Figure 3: Choose a type for new working set

Step 4: Firstly, we type a name for new working set, and then we select plug-ins that we want to move from Workspace Contents to Working set content. Finally, hit Finish.

Figure 4: Select projects/plug-ins

Step 5: Select our new working set and hit OK. You could choose more than one working set.

Figure 5: Select working sets

When we finish, we just see what projects or plug-ins on chosen working sets. Using working sets do not restrict resources of the whole system. It is just the way to limit views on the Package Explorer. We still could use Ctrl + Shift + R or whatever to open other classes or resources.