Use mylyn tasks to organize your ABAP in Eclipse workspace

[ThFiedler]

This week ondrej.semanwrote a small blog post about a useful feature in Eclipse that helps to organize your daily life as a developer : Using Mylyn in Eclipse (usefull tools) . I want to summarize shortly what is possible with mylyn within the ABAP development perspective.

Mylyn is a task management system that is integrated in the Eclipse tooling.

You can open the Task List view via the top level menu of your eclipse installation:

The Task List View is opened and is ready to use. Tasks are grouped in categories (My Development Tasks, My Product Backlog) and can have sub-tasks. You can create local tasks that are only stored on your PC or you can use tasks from a so-called task repository like here in the example from a jira repository.

When you double-click on a task in the list an editor comes up to enter the details of the task:

One very beneficial feature of the task management system is the provisioning of a so-called task context. That means that a task automatically tracks which editors are open in the IDE. To benefit from the context handling you first have to activate a task. Activating a task means that from now on you are actively working on the task and the development objects that will be opened are stored in the context of the task. Activating a task is done via the context menu in the Task List: 

You will see the benefit of the context when you switch between several tasks. Switching a task means that you deactivate one task in the task view and activate another one. What happens now in the IDE is that the editors that are related to task1 are closed and the editors that are releated to the newly activated task are opened.

Mylyn in general provides additonal features that are not available yet for ABAP development like for example the filtering in the project explorer. But we already got feedback from developers that even with the restricted feature set for ABAP the mylyn task management is a very beneficial framework to organize your workspace.

Maybe you give it a try and give us Feedback.

Kind Regards,

Thomas.