I recently updated one of my E4 applications from Juno to Kepler (V4.3) release. Beside a few things (e.g. adding the HandlerProcessingAddOn to e4xmi configuration) I suddenly lost my customized key bindings. Unfortunately, there was not even a slight hint anywhere in the net why this happened. Most of the web sites were just referring to the afore mentioned add-on. But this didn’t bring back the missing key bindings.
So the only solution was to debug the bootstrap of RCP/E4 and find out where the key bindings disappeared. I noticed very early that my Binding Table was read but didn’t contain the correct key bindings. Although, an earlier breakpoint revealed that they have been read correctly. However, somehow they were removed and replaced by other ones.
Debugging in Eclipse/E4 is quite exhausting escpecially when you try to trace a problem in the bootstrap mechanism. But finally I saw an extension point (a “processor” to be precise) as root cause. This extension just threw away my key bindings. It eventually turned out to be the org.eclipse.ui.workbench plugin which I required in my application. This plugin defines a BindingToModelProcessor that simply throws away all key bindings within the org.eclipse.ui.contexts.dialogAndWindow Binding Context except those tagged with type:user.
That’s the solution. Simple as that. I added the tag to all my key bindings and they were not removed and working again. So be aware when adding org.eclipse.ui.workbench as a dependency plugin to your E4 application. 😉