What is my selection ?

Do you know that problem? There is a view in Eclipse displaying some artficats and you want to contribute a new popup menu entry for them. So you go ahead and create a new objectContribution for the org.eclipse.ui.popupMenus extension point. The only question is, what object type do I want to contribute the entry for? How do I find out what kind of objects are displayed?

One way is to go and have a look at the source code of any view that displays this object and dig a bit in their label or content provider. Doing so you need to find out where the view is implemented and so on ...

I have written a tiny tool that should make things easier here and shows the type of the object selected. You simply right click an object in a view and select "Show selection".

A small message box will pop-up presenting some information about the object you selected.

Typically in your extension you would want to specify one of the interfaces for the object type to contribute a menu entry for.

To many people have asked me to tell them what type of object they are seeing because they want to contribute an action or menu. I was just sick of searching everytime :) You can download the plugin including sources here.