Workday Studio Eclipse IDE Can No Longer Render Non-XML Documents After Reinstall
What it means
After uninstalling and reinstalling the Workday Studio Eclipse-based IDE, often alongside a Java or JCE policy update, the IDE can no longer render documents in their normal editor view and falls back to showing raw XML. The log shows Eclipse failing to resolve a bundled BIRT report designer plug-in resource, which means the local Eclipse installation itself is incomplete, not that anything in the tenant changed.
Troubleshooting
- Confirm the failure is local-install-specific by checking whether a colleague's Studio install on the same machine type can open the same document normally.
- Check the Studio installation folder for a partial overwrite: installing a new version directly on top of an old one, rather than removing the old install directory first, is the most common cause of an Eclipse instance with mismatched or missing plug-in jars.
- Clear the local Eclipse workspace metadata (the .metadata folder under the workspace directory), since a stale workspace can keep referencing plug-in resources from the previous install.
- Verify the installed Java version and any JCE unlimited-strength policy files match what the current Studio version documents as required; a mismatched Java runtime can also cause the IDE to fail resolving its own bundled plug-ins at startup.
Fully uninstall Studio, delete the leftover installation directory and workspace .metadata folder by hand, then do a clean install rather than installing over the existing one.
Always remove the previous Studio installation directory completely before installing a new version, and keep a documented, tested Java and JCE policy version pairing for the team so a future upgrade doesn't reintroduce the same plug-in resolution failure.