I want my feature request implemented yesterday!

"What do you get when you put together a bunch of passionate developers and a code freeze policy due to the end of a release?" This is probably a good start for a Dilbert cartoon. Certainly Scott Adams' answer would be brazilian times funnier than mine, which is "crazy people implementing the cool things they want regardless of how beautiful the day is outside".

The "cool thing" I worked on yesterday was to leverage the pattern filter widget you see on Eclipse's New Project Wizard to some EMF dialogs. After some digging I was able to get the results I was looking for by simply using new FilteredTree(...).getViewer() instead of new TreeViewer(...). BTW, I would recommend reading the PatternFilter's Javadoc if you are considering doing the same in your code.

Everything was going smooth up to the moment that I've opened a subclass of org.eclipse.ui.dialogs.ElementTreeSelectionDialog. I couldn't believe what I was seeing: there was no way to replace the TreeViewer used by this class. Profoundly disappointed, I began to write a feature request for the UI team. As I was doing it, I thought that I would be a much better Eclipse citizen by providing a patch instead of simply describing what to do. So I checked out the "org.eclipse.ui.workbench" bundle, opened ElementTreeSelectionDialog, and added a new protected method that instantiates the TreeViewer. Before changing the line of code that would use my new method, I looked around to see how the Javadocs on the file are written. To my surprise I discovered this new method: ElementTreeSelectionDialog.doCreateTreeViewer(Composite, int). After blinking my eyes for a few seconds I realize that the method I need is already available in Eclipse 3.4. Amazing!

Kudos to the UI team.