How can I call eclipse refactoring history programmatically?

Question

If you go to Refactor -> History... in Eclipse you will see a Dialog with all the history of refactorings done in your workspace.

I would like to know if there is a way to create a plugin that simply counts how many let's say rename refactorings are in the history. How would you do that?

Answer 1

The IRefactoringHistoryService interface has methods to access the refactoring history.

Get the interface with:

IRefactoringHistoryService service = RefactoringCore.getHistoryService();

You can then get the history for a project using:

IProject project = ... project you are interested in

RefactoringHistory history = service.getProjectHistory(project, progressMonitor);

There are other methods which let you get the workspace history and specify start and end time stamps.

The history object can return an array of objects representing the refactoring:

RefactoringDescriptorProxy [] proxies = history.getDescriptors();

You can get the actual refactoring descriptor from the proxy:

RefactoringDescriptor desc = proxy.getDescription();