Demonstrate progress in Eclipse RCP Wizard
My UX designer has worked on a wizard for my app.
Since the wizard has 3 steps, she'd like to indicate to the user that they are on step 1 of 3, for example.
In other UI frameworks we see such indicators (like the one below), but I can't find a precedent for an Eclipse RCP app.
My UX designer suggested a panel on the left-hand side, with named categories of data that change shade as they are completed.
Are there any Eclipse RCP components that already offer the above? Or am I going to produce my own from scratch?
I don't know of a ready to use widget that gives an overview of the steps within a wizard.
Though there is a progress indicator for wizards, this one is meant to show the progress of operations that take place between pages or once the wizard is finished.
To implement the horizontal overview with lines and dots I would choose a Canvas to draw on.
The vertical overview seems easier to implement and could leverage a FormText to display a list of steps and emphasise the current step. FormText interprets strings that may contain a small subset of HTML. Most notably, old-school text style elements like <b>, <i>, but also bullet points.
Another question that occurred to me, is where to place the overview widget. Each page could hold its own instance of the widget which probably gives more freedom regarding the layout - at the price of a slight resource overhead as there are several instances of the widget. Integrating the overview widget into the wizard itself would require to implement a (or extend an existing) wizard container.