Find the dependent bundles in Eclipse at runtime

Question

How can an Eclipse bundle (eg. within activator code) find the dependent Bundle instances at runtime? I would like to find the bundles that Eclipse has choosen to satisfy the dependency requirements, I do not want to interprete the manifest myself.

An example: I would like to find all resources named "marker.txt" in all bundles on which my current bundle depends upon. Also the transitive dependencies. In order to accomplish this I need to be able to find all these bundles to begin with.

Answer 1

There is no easy way to determine the dependency. The best way is to go through the PackageAdmin interface. See the OSGi spec for PackageAdmin and getImportingBundles in particular: http://www.osgi.org/javadoc/r4v42/org/osgi/service/packageadmin/ExportedPackage.html#getImportingBundles()

You need to determine for all installed bundles, which one exports one or more packages that your bundle is importing. The easiest way to achieve this is to call PackageAdmin.getExportedPackages(Bundle bundle) with bundles = null. This returns an array of all exported packages. You then need to iterate of this array and call ExportPackage.getImportingBundles().

Answer 2

Please see my answer to this question. 4.3 will have a new bundle wiring API that will allow things like this.