String Substitution in Preferences

Question

Hi,
Can anyone please tell me what is the String Substitution in
Run/Debug in Preferences menu? After I added a string substitution
entry, how do I invoke it? Any examples of how to use it?
I'm hoping it's something like shortcut keys that maps
something like "pubf" to "public function". But seems like that's
not it. I also tried to do mapping like that in the Keys setting in
Preferences too, but couldn't get that to work either..
thanks for any help,
john

Answer 1

String Substitution in Run/Debug in Preferences will not do
what you want. String Substitution in that preference page is used
to allow ${myvar} to be replaced with a different value in certain
other dialog pages. It is documented here (but again, this is not
what you want):
http://help.eclipse.org/stable/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.jdt.doc.user/reference/prefere nces/run-debug/ref-string_substitution.htm
As for shortcut keys like "pubf" mapping to "public
function", I don't know of a way to do that. One thing that does
work, though, is that Alt+/ can be used as general-purpose word
completion. What it does is it searches the current file for words
that match what you have typed. So for example, if the current file
already contains the word "public" somewhere else, then "pub"
followed by Alt+/ will complete the word "public".
But of course if the current file doesn't already contain the
word "public" then that won't work. Alt+/ is really more useful for
cases like this -- I have added a click handler,
click="myNewClickHandler()", and then I want to implement that
function, so I type
public function myNew
And then I type Alt+/ and it fills in the function
name.