Disabling the Next Button in an Eclipse Wizard

I’ve been writing an Eclipse wizard that will be used to create new socket applications. The options selected in early in the wizard determine whether it’s appropriate for the user to configure connection properties before creating the project.

If you have written a wizard, chances are you’re familiar with the setPageComplete(complete:boolean) method that is used to enable the ‘Finish’ button when enough user input has been gathered.

It’s more complicated to disable the ‘Next’ button. To do that, you have to override the WizardPage base implementation of getNextPage() (of course you do, it’s totally different from the ‘Finish’ button, isn’t it?); this method should return null to indicate that the next page is not available.

The implementation looks a little bit like this:

{% highlight java %} class ConfigurationPage extends WizardPage

...

@Override
public IWizardPage getNextPage()
{
    if (!isConnectionPageRequired()) {
        return null;
    }
    return super.getNextPage();
}

} {% endhighlight %}

Now, depending on the configuration options, we can choose whether to enable ‘Next’ or ‘Finish’:

“He chose, poorly.”

He didn’t really choose poorly, I just love that scene. And if you’re wondering, yes, there is a method called getPreviousPage(), although if you plan to disable the ‘Back’ button you might be a sociopath.

The relevant Eclipse doc is here.