An adapter manager maintains a registry of adapter factories. Clients directly invoke methods on an adapter manager to register and unregister adapters. All adaptable objects (that is, objects that implement the IAdaptable interface) funnel IAdaptable.getAdapter invocations to their adapter manager's IAdapterManger.getAdapter method. The adapter manager then forwards this request unmodified to the IAdapterFactory.getAdapter method on one of the registered adapter factories.

Adapter factories can be registered programmatically using the registerAdapters method. Alternatively, they can be registered declaratively using the org.eclipse.core.runtime.adapters extension point. Factories registered with this extension point will not be able to provide adapters until their corresponding plugin has been activated.

The following code snippet shows how one might register an adapter of type com.example.acme.Sticky on resources in the workspace.

  IAdapterFactory pr = new IAdapterFactory() {
  	public Class[] getAdapterList() {
  		return new Class[] { com.example.acme.Sticky.class };
  	}
  	public Object getAdapter(Object adaptableObject, adapterType) {
  		IResource res = (IResource) adaptableObject;
  		QualifiedName key = new QualifiedName("com.example.acme", "sticky-note");
  		try {
  			com.example.acme.Sticky v = (com.example.acme.Sticky) res.getSessionProperty(key);
  			if (v == null) {
  				v = new com.example.acme.Sticky();
  				res.setSessionProperty(key, v);
  			}
  		} catch (CoreException e) {
  			// unable to access session property - ignore
  		}
  		return v;
  	}
  }
  Platform.getAdapterManager().registerAdapters(pr, IResource.class);
   

This interface is not intended to be implemented by clients.