EPD Editor

This is an editor for ILCD data sets with EPD format extensions.

Building from source

The EPD editor is an Eclipse RCP application. To compile it from source you need to have the following tools installed:

• a Java Development Kit >= 14
• Maven
• the Eclipse package for RCP developers

When you have these tools installed you can build the application from source via the following steps:

Install the openLCA core modules

The EPD Editor uses the current version of the openLCA core modules for reading and writing ILCD data sets. It is a plain Maven project and can be installed via mvn install. See its documentation for more information.

Get the source code of the application

We recommend to use Git to manage the source code, but you can also download the source code as a zip file. If you have Git installed, just clone the repository via:

git clone https://github.com/GreenDelta/epd-editor.git

The project folder should look like this:

epd-editor
  .git/
  src/
  icons/
  META_INF/
  ...
  pom.xml
  ...

Copy the Maven dependencies

We use Maven to manage our non-Eclipse library dependencies. To pull them into the project, just execute mvn package in the project folder:

cd epd-editor
mvn package

This will copy these libraries under the epd-editor/libs folder.

Set up the Eclipse project

Open Eclipse and select/create a workspace directory. Import the epd-editor project into Eclipse via Import/General/Existing Projects into Workspace (select the epd-editor folder). Open the file platform.target and click on 'Set as target platform' on the top right of the editor. This will download the runtime platform into the folder .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.pde.core/.bundle_pool of your workspace and thus may take a bit of time. After this, the project should have no compile errors, and you should be able to open the app.product file and launch the application (click on Launch an Eclipse application).

The target platform is configured for multi-platform builds as described here. You may have to update the target platform when setting up the development environment.

Also, when updating the target platform it is probably required to update the product configuration in app.product. Just remove and re-add all required plugins. It is important to set the start levels for the following plugins to these values:

<configurations>
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.core.runtime" autoStart="true" startLevel="0" />
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.equinox.common" autoStart="true" startLevel="2" />
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.equinox.ds" autoStart="true" startLevel="2" />
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.equinox.event" autoStart="true" startLevel="2" />
  <plugin id="org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator" autoStart="true" startLevel="1" />
</configurations>

Labels and translations

Labels and translations are externalized in the src/app/messages*.properties files. The keys in these files map to a static field in the class app.M which are then used in the Java code. It is recommended to use JLokalize to edit the messages*.properties files. Labels that are not externalized yet start with a hash mark #. Thus, searching the Java source code for "# should give a list of strings that need to be externalized (if there are any). The script scripts/make_messages_fields.py generates the list of fields for the class app.M from the messages.properties file.

Validation profile

The EPD-Editor uses the EPD profiles from the ILCD Validation API. Profiles need to be located under validation_profiles. A profile for the German OEKOBAUDAT is automatically added to this location when dependencies are copied using mvn package as described above under "Copy the Maven dependencies".

License

Unless stated otherwise, all source code of the openLCA project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. Please see the LICENSE.md file in the root directory of the source code.