Programmatically open detail section of progress dialog in Eclipse

Question

In a progress dialog (IProgressMonitor), there is a Details button that expands the progress dialog to show the details section. How do I open the details section programmatically in my Eclipse plugin?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You don't.

The UI for progress reporting is absolutely not part of the progress API, instead only the concept of tasks, sub tasks and their running state is part of that API. So in another version of eclipse the progress might be shown by playing a sound instead of showing a dialog.

Even your assumption of having that dialog is wrong. When you activate the workspace preference "Always in background", then a user will not see that dialog at all.

And as a last thing: Even if you feel that your plugin is so important that it should behave different than other plugins in Eclipse (and therefore want to access that progress dialog somehow), your users will not feel the same. And they will be confused when installing your plugin together with other plugins because they don't behave the same, although being part of one installation.