
Preferences with Envisage
=========================

Envisage presents preferences with two different extension points::

  PREFERENCES = 'envisage.preferences'
  PREFERENCES_PAGES = 'envisage.ui.workbench.preferences_pages'

The first one is only model-related and is for programmatic access to
preferences, whereas the second one is for displaying UIs to the user in
the workbench plugin.

Preferences
------------

The contribution point is simply a list of URLs to the preference file, e.g.::

    preferences_pages = List(
        ['pkgfile://acme.acmelab/preferences.ini'],
        contributes_to=PREFERENCES_PAGES,
    )

where acme.acmelab is the python-module-like path to the package in which
the default preferences.ini is stored.

A plugin usually needs only one preferences file, regardless of how many
preference pages or settings it has.


Preferences pages
------------------

The preference pages are a Traits UI view to wrap the preferences and
allow the user to modify them. A preference page is defined as in the
preference_manager example in the AppTools examples. It can than be
contributed to the workbench, as in::

    preferences_pages = List(contributes_to=PREFERENCES_PAGES)

    def _preferences_pages_default(self):
        """ Trait initializer. """
        from acme.preference_pages import ACMEPreferencePages

        return [ACMEPreferencePages]

A plugin needs to contribute a preferences pages class for each category
of preferences it contributes.
