Schema identifier in the extension points

There are many times you may want to know the id of an extension. Say for instance you want to place your newly created view under the General category. To do that you need to specify the id of the category and the usual way to find out is to browse thru the Plug-in registry view. Given the plethora of plugins & extension points, its not a trivial task.

In case you missed in the New and Noteworthy, 3.4 introduced a wonderful feature that helps you in this - the new Schema Identifier attribute. The implementors of the extension point can simply click the Browse button to get the required id. No need to swim thru the Plug-in Registry view.



If you decide to key in the id directly without using the Browse button and if you make a mistake, PDE will warn you that the id is not available:



If you are an extension point author, to enable this feature, all you have to do is set the attribute type as identifier:



and use the browse button to select the id of the extension point you want: