okworx / epd-editor

This is an editor for ILCD data sets with EPD format extensions

EPD Editor

This is an editor for ILCD data sets with EPD format extensions.

Building from source

The EPD editor is an Eclipse RCP application. To compile it from source you need to have the following tools installed:

• a Java Development Kit v8
• Maven
• the Eclipse package for RCP developers

When you have these tools installed you can build the application from source via the following steps:

Install the openLCA core modules

The EPD Editor uses the current version of the openLCA core modules for reading and writing ILCD data sets. It is a plain Maven project and can be installed via mvn install. See its documentation for more information.

Get the source code of the application

We recommend to use Git to manage the source code but you can also download the source code as a zip file. If you have Git installed, just clone the repository via:

git clone https://github.com/GreenDelta/epd-editor.git

The project folder should look like this:

epd-editor
  .git/
  src/
  icons/
  META_INF/
  ...
  pom.xml
  ...

Copy the Maven dependencies

We use Maven to manage our non-Eclipse library dependencies. To pull them into the project, just execute mvn package in the project folder:

cd epd-editor
mvn package

This will copy these libraries under the epd-editor/libs folder.

Set up the Eclipse project

Open Eclipse and select/create a workspace directory. Import the epd-editor project into Eclipse via Import/General/Existing Projects into Workspace (select the epd-editor folder). Open the file platform.target and click on 'Set as target platform' on the top right of the editor. This will download the runtime platform into the folder .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.pde.core/.bundle_pool of your workspace and thus may take a bit of time. After this, the project should have no compile errors and you should be able to open the app.product file and launch the application (click on Launch an Eclipse application).

The target platform is configured for multi-platform builds as described here. You may have to update the target platform when setting up the development environment.

Also, when updating the target platform it is probably required to update the product configuration in app.product. Just remove and re-add all required plugins. It is important to set the start levels for the following plugings to these values:

<configurations>
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.core.runtime" autoStart="true" startLevel="0" />
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.equinox.common" autoStart="true" startLevel="2" />
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.equinox.ds" autoStart="true" startLevel="2" />
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.equinox.event" autoStart="true" startLevel="2" />
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator" autoStart="true" startLevel="1" />
</configurations>

Labels and translations

Labels and translations are externalized in the src/app/messages*.properties files. The keys in these files map to a static field in the class app.M which are then used in the Java code. It is recommended to use JLokalize to edit the messages*.properties files. Labels that are not externalized yet start with a hash mark #. Thus, searching the Java source code for "# should give a list of strings that need to be externalized (if there are any). The script scripts/make_messages_fields.py generates the list of fields for the class app.M from the messages.properties file.

Validation profile

The EPD-Editor uses the EPD profiles from the ILCD Validation API. Profiles need to be located under validation_profiles. A profile for the German OEKOBAUDAT is automatically added to this location when dependencies are copied using mvn package as described above under "Copy the Maven dependencies".

Building the distribution packages

We currently build the application via the Eclipse export: right-click on the project and select Export > Eclipse product. In the wizard select the following settings:

• Configuration: epd-editor/app-product (should be the default)
• Root directory: epd-editor
• Synchronize before exporting: yes [x]
• Destination directory: choose the build folder of this project
• Generate p2 repository: no [ ] (would be just overhead)
• Export for multiple platforms: yes [x]
• (take the defaults for the others)

In the next page, select the platforms for which you want to build the product. However, only the Windows x86_64 version is currently fully supported when building the distribution package and also the build is written for Windows.

Unfortunately, with Java 10 the export currently produces the following error in Exlipse Oxygen and Photon:

option -bootclasspath not supported at compliance level 9 and above

This is related to this bug in Eclipse. As also a Maven Tycho build currently fails with Java 10 due to this bug (which is marked as fixed but still appears in our EPD-Editor build), we need to set the Java compliance level to Java 8 in Eclipse and the project configuration in order to have a working build.

Windows

The make.bat script packages then the application (and the clean.bat removes all the build artifacts again). In order to run the script, you need to add the following things to the build folder:

Java Runtime Environment (JRE)

We package a JRE together with the application. Just download the OpenJDK 8 JRE for Windows 64 bit (e.g. jre-8u141-windows-x64.tar.gz), extract it, and copy the content into the folder build/jre/win64.

7zip

For packaging the applications we use 7zip. Just download the non-installer version and copy the (64bit) 7za.exe directly into the build folder.

macOS

To build on macOS, it is necessary to create a build path variable SWT_LIB and point it to Eclipse.app/Contents/Eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.swt.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_3.106.3.v20180329-0507.jar in order for the application to run.

To create an application bundle for distribution, run the export wizard with the above settings. The result will be written to a folder eclipse in the selected export folder and will not run on macOS out of the box. In order to repair the build, run the repair4mac.sh script giving the full or relative path to the eclipse folder above as an argument.

In order for the application to run under macOS, currently the Java 8 JDK needs to be installed on the target system.

Validation profile

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License

Unless stated otherwise, all source code of the openLCA project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. Please see the LICENSE.md file in the root directory of the source code.