"Access restriction" error in Eclipse plugins

I spent quite a lot of time today trying to debug “Access restriction” error in one of my Eclipse plugins. In the last four years of Eclipse plugin development, I don’t recall ever facing this issue, but today suddenly some of the imports in one of the classes in my Eclipse plugin were flagged off as errors –

Access restriction: The type ISelection is not accessible due to restriction on required library <eclipse-path>\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.jface_3.6.1.M20100825-0800.jar

I had seen warnings about ‘restricted access’ for some of the imports earlier, but those were for classes that Eclipse discouraged to use e,g, for internal Eclipse classes. But today I was seeing errors.

The error does not tell much about what could have gone wrong. ISelection is exported from jface plugin and it is a public interface. And I had used this class without any error in other plugins.

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Eclipse SWT GridLayout – Making the widget fill horizontally

I have been stuck with the problem of making UI widgets fill horizontally in a grid layout a few times. The solution is simple, but when I have to create UI using Eclipse SWT after a long gap, I tend to forget how I had made this work earlier, so I decided to blog about this.

I had to create a simple UI with one label and associated text box. I coded it like this –

GridLayout layout = new GridLayout(2, false);
tabContainer.setLayout(layout); //this is the parent composite

Label label1 = new Label(tabContainer, SWT.NONE);
label1.setText("Some Label:");
GridData gd = new GridData();
gd.grabExcessHorizontalSpace = false;
label1.setLayoutData(gd);

Text txtBox1 = new Text(tabContainer, SWT.BORDER);
gd = new GridData();
gd.grabExcessHorizontalSpace = true;
txtBox1.setLayoutData(gd);

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