Eclipse RCP Preferences – Storing & Retrieving values using preferences

Often in the IDE development, we require to store some application specific values. We can make use of eclipse preferences to store and retrieve values.

The Eclipse has three different types of scopes.
Configuration scope
Default scope
Instance scope

The below code snippet shows how we can store and retrieve values using configuration scope:

 
Preferences preferences = ConfigurationScope.INSTANCE.getNode("com.mycomp.client");
Preferences pref = preferences.node("node1");
pref.put("key", "val");
 try
  {
  // Forcing the application to save the preferences
  preferences.flush();
  }
  catch (BackingStoreException e)
  {
    e.printStackTrace();
  }

Retrieving the stored value:

 Preferences preferences = ConfigurationScope.INSTANCE.getNode("com.mycomp.client");
 Preferences pref  = preferences.node("node1");
 String val = pref.get("key", "default");

For further reference you can refer here

Note: Preferences are workspace specific. So If the workspace is changed or deleted then the stored values will be lost.

Happy coding.. 🙂