Project Wizard - Adding Support for Creating New Project Types

Project Wizard

Working with the project wizard can be illustrated with the RedLine SmallTalk plugin. See also Project Wizard Tutorial.

Implementing a New Module Type

Additional support for specific tools and technologies is usually done via implementing some certain module type which is attached to the project. New module type should be derived from the class ModuleType.

Custom Project Wizard

Main utilities to configure a custom project wizard can be found in the package lang-api.ide.util.projectWizard. These classes and interfaces serve the following purposes:

Modification of the configuration wizard view
Adding new steps to the wizard
Providing additional setting for project creation
Handling activities during project creation
Initial environment configuration

Module Type

To create a new module type add an extension

<moduleType
    id="MY_MODULE"
    implementationClass="st.redline.smalltalk.module.MyModuleType"/>

to the plugin.xml. A custom module type should extend the ModuleType generic from ModuleBuilder. The following module type implementation of a custom module type shows how this instance can be registered and implemented.

Implementing Module Builder

To set up a new module environment ModuleBuilder class should be extended and registered as an extension point like the following snippet shows:

<extensions defaultExtensionNs="com.intellij">
  <moduleBuilder
      builderClass="org.jetbrains.plugins.ruby.rails.facet.versions.MyModuleBuilder"/>
</extensions>

Functionality which is mandatory to implement consists of:

Setting up a root model for the new module by overriding
public abstract void setupRootModel( ModifiableRootModel modifiableRootModel) throws ConfigurationException;
Getting a module type
public abstract ModuleType getModuleType();

See JavaModuleBuilder to understand better how to implement a module builder.

If your module type is based on the Java module and meant to support Java as well, extending JavaModuleBuilder is enough. No extension point needs to be registered. Refer to SmallTalk module type to see how JavaModuleBuilder can be derived.

Implementing Module Builder Listener

Module builder listener reacts on a new module creation, which could be done either as a part of the project creation process, or as adding a new module to the already existing project. To provide a certain behavior right after a module has been created, module builder should implement ModuleBuilderListener.moduleCreated(Module).

Examples of the tasks executed right after a module has been created may include configuring module roots, looking up for an SDK and setting it up, adding a specific facet if required, etc. For more details, please see the following SmallTalk custom module type implementation.

Adding New Wizard Steps

Adding new steps to the module wizard can be done by overriding AbstractModuleBuilder.createWizardSteps(WizardContext, ModulesProvider). See an example module builder. If this method returns a non-empty array of ModuleWizardStep objects, new steps will be shown in their indexing order while creating a new module. The following implementation for the SmallTalk project type illustrates how a custom wizard step can be created. The RsModuleWizardStep class is derived from ModuleWizardStep, which has two methods to be overridden:

public JComponent getComponent();
defines how the step will look like
public void updateDataModel();
commits data from UI into ModuleBuilder and WizardContext

Facets in IntelliJ are the way to store multiple kinds of module-specific settings, for instance to make a language support or framework available in some given module. To understand facets better from the end-user's point of view, see the Facet documentation section.

Implementing Project Structure Detector

To support the creation of your module when a project is imported from existing sources, extend ProjectStructureDetector. To detect the files your module supports, implement ProjectStructureDetector.detectRoots().

Refer to the Smalltalk project structure detector to see example implementation.

But detecting the files is not enough, you also need to create a module for the project if appropriate by implementing setupProjectStructure(). Here is an example that creates a module if no other modules exist in the project structure.

@Override
public void setupProjectStructure(@NotNull Collection<DetectedProjectRoot> roots,
                                  @NotNull ProjectDescriptor projectDescriptor,
                                  @NotNull ProjectFromSourcesBuilder builder) {
  List<ModuleDescriptor> modules = projectDescriptor.getModules();
  if (modules.isEmpty()) {
    modules = new ArrayList<>();
    for (DetectedProjectRoot root : roots) {
      modules.add(new ModuleDescriptor(root.getDirectory(),
          MyModuleType.getInstance(), ContainerUtil.emptyList()));
    }
    projectDescriptor.setModules(modules);
  }
}

Last modified: 26 October 2023