S60 Open to new features

Starting with Carbide.c++ release 1.2 we’ve introduced public APIs for Carbide 3rd party Carbide development. These APIs are also being used by internal Nokia tools teams and other Symbian OS licensees. However, I do occasionally get a technical question from plug-in developers that don’t even know there are APIs to access Carbide project info. So in those cases, a quick start might help to ease into Carbide development.

Help and Examples

The Help is accessed under Carbide Help book topic Carbide.c++ Plug-in Developer Guide. There are a couple of working examples including the leavscan plug-in that come with full sources to get you a quick look at some working code.

Getting Carbide Project Information

Retrieval of Carbide project information starts with knowing your org.eclipse.core.resources.IProject resource and retrieving the com.nokia.carbide.cdt.builder.ICarbideBuildManager instance:

    ICarbideBuildManager buildMgr = ICarbideBuilderPlugin.getBuildManager();

Now with your IProject resource you can grab the actual Carbide project in com.nokia.carbide.cdt.builder.ICarbideProjectInfo:

     // Assumes IProject (project) is known.
ICarbideProjectInfo cpi = null;
if (buildMgr.isCarbideProject(project)){
 // check to make sure this is a Carbide project
cpi = buildMgr.getProjectInfo(project);
}

Once you get ICarbideProjectInfo object you can access all the project data, such as environment variables and SIS builder information via the com.nokia.carbide.cdt.builder.ICarbideBuildConfiguration interface. You can retrieve either the default configuration or the full list:

     // Get the default build configuration
ICarbideBuildConfiguration defultConfig = cpi.getDefaultConfiguration();
// Get all configurations for this project.
List<ICarbideBuildConfiguration> configList = cpi.getBuildConfigurations();

It is important to note that the data retrieved by the ICarbideBuildConfiguration object is what you see in the project properties pages under the Carbide.c++ group. This is separate from the data in the INF and MMP files
which we will discuss next.

Retrieving INF/MMP Project Information

All Carbide build stages, with the exception of the post-link SIS Builder stage get their data from INF and MMP files.
So naturally Carbide needs a way to retrieve and store this data for doing stuff like setting up the source indexer
and displaying the visual INF and MMP editors. The com.nokia.carbide.cdt.builder.EpocEngineHelper class is a good first stop to retrieve this information. For example, if I want to get all the source files in the first MMP file:

    // ...assumes ICarbideProjectInformation (cpi) is known.
List<IPath> mmpPaths = EpocEngineHelper.getMMPFilesForProject(cpi);
// array length check omitted for brevity....
List<IPath> srcFilesTest = EpocEngineHelper.getSourceFilesForConfiguration(defultConfig, mmpPaths.get(0)); 

SDK Management

Each SDK entry in devices.xml is analogous to a com.nokia.carbide.cpp.sdk.core.ISymbianSDK object. If we want to get the entire list of ISymbianSDK objects (same list and properties from the SDK Preferences page) we simply invoke:

ISDKManager sdkMgr = SDKCorePlugin.getSDKManager();
List<ISymbianSDK> sdkList = sdkMgr.getSDKList();

Now we can iterate the list and get whatever information we want out of the installed SDKs.
For example, using Java 5 iterators we can get the EPOCROOT values of all the SDKs:

     for (ISymbianSDK currSDK : sdkList){
String epocRootStr = currSDK.getEPOCROOT();
} 

The Carbide.c++ Plug-in SDK Help is also full of examples for generating your own custom project templates and even UI Designer components. I’ll leave that topic for another time.