Base64 Decoding with Eclipse

There are very few things in software development that are equally annoying as localization topics, especially dealing with dates in different timezones and/or - and here is my all time favorite - encoding issues.

We have a lot of data and use a bunch of different technologies, languages, and platforms to process the data. With regard to encoding topics, this does not help much either. Someone in the company decided it could be a good idea to encode critical data, especially strings that are not under our direct control, with Base64 encoding. In this way, data exchange between different platforms and languages can be restricted to exchange (relatively simple) ASCII data.

And thus, we now have to deal a lot with Base64 encoded data. During creation of unit tests, debugging, or manual validation of productive data, there is a frequent need to decode Base64 literals. Most times I used one of the many free online tools for this purpose. Although these tools do what they promise, the associated workflow is kind of messy: step through a unit test in Eclipse, copy some Base64 string into clipboard, switch to the browser, find and open one of these conversion tools - if not already open, convert the string, copy the result, and take it back into Eclipse.

However, after a little preparation, leaving Eclipse is completely unnecessary. There is an Eclipse feature called External Tool Configurations which allows to execute arbitrary commands directly from Eclipse. On the other hand there is Groovy with its famous -e option to execute code in-line. Combining these two, it is possible to execute some Groovy helper code directly from Eclipse. With the help of meta programming Groovy extended Java's String class with several features, one of them a build-in Base64 decoding method. The remainder of this post describes how to configure a simple Base64 decoding tool in Eclipse.

1. Open the External Tool Configuration dialog:
   
   
2. Create a new configuration, give it a name, specify the path to the Groovy executable, and finally insert the code.
   
   The Arguments: text area contains the following code:

   -e "def input = '${string_prompt:Base64 decoding}';  
   println new String(input.decodeBase64())"
   

   The Eclipse variable ${string_prompt} makes a popup dialog appear which promts for an input value.
3. Save the configuration

Base64 decoding can now be executed the following way:

1. Select the newly created Tool
   
   
2. Insert the string to convert and start conversion
   
3. Read the result from the Console view