Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Time for action – plugging the leak

Now that the leak has been discovered, it needs to be fixed. The solution is to call dispose on the Color once the view itself is removed.

A quick investigation of the ClockWidget suggests that overriding dispose might work, though this is not the correct solution; see later for why.

1. Create a dispose method in ClockWidget with the following code:

   @Override
   public void dispose() {
     if (color != null && !color.isDisposed())
       color.dispose();
     super.dispose();
   }

2. Run the target Eclipse application in debug mode (with the tracing enabled, as before) and open and close the view. The output will show something like this:

   There are 87 Color instances There are 91 Color instances There are 94 Color instances There are 98 Color ...