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Editing SFDC Zipped Static Resources in Eclipse – Zip Editor
By Vincent on March 1, 2011
One of the reasons people don’t create a zipped static resource in Salesforce.com is that it’s a bit of a pain in the neck to edit their contents.
You typically have to download the file from Salesforce (if you don’t already have a current version locally), unzip, perform your edits, zip them back up and then upload back again through the UI. Or. if you were a bit more clever, you could have tried to leverage the static resource is a Force.com project in Eclipse, and tried to get the Force.com IDE to push changes up to Salesforce.
Both options are a pain in the neck if all you want to do is play with some css class definition, as you’d probably be doing those same steps over and over again.
Now, I’m sure I’m not the first one to figure this out, but getting a zip editor plugin for eclipse comes in extremely handy for this situation. I recently installed one called “Zip Editor” into my Force.com IDE (Eclipse Helios). This looks very promising, as I’m now able to view the contents of zipped resource files within Eclipse itself and even make edits directly into the zip file. Now there is a little bit of a weird workflow that I have to follow to get zipeditor to save my updates to the zip resource, but it’s not so bad and WAY better than what I was doing before!
So here’s a link to the Sourceforce project for the Eclipse Zip Editor. Let me know if you run into a better solution for editing SFDC zipped resources!