Description Jacob Robertson 2006-01-24 08:52:46 EST

If I have a graphic designer use Eclipse's "Save Perspective As..." Dialog, we can create our precise custom perspectives with all the right views etc.  However, there is no mechanism to take that "Preference" as it is saved in the workspace, and deploy that new perspective with a plugin for our RCP.  I have muddled with some workarounds, using internal APIs, but so far everything I've tried won't actually restore the customization, just the original copied perspective.  In any case, the workarounds I'm persuing are just that - and I believe someone who is intimate with this code should be able to quite easily expose this.

Let me summarize what I've been trying.  To get a customized perspective to deploy, I do this.

1) Save a customized perspective
2) Close the workbench (to get it to persist)
3) Go to the preferences file, and copy that xml
4) paste that xml into my own preferences file that is loaded in a plugin
5) Create a preferences extension in that plugin, to a custom PerspectiveFactory with the id of that extension mapping to the preference Id I pasted in step 4

When the PerspectiveFactory is called, it tries to load the preference in a number of ways that I gleaned from looking at PerspectiveDescriptor, Perspective, PerspectiveRegistry, and PerspectiveExtensionReader.  However, as mentioned above, none of this works.

Obviously there is code already in place to do the perspective loading for me, but what is missing is the ability to load my own "Memento" (from a preferences.ini or really I should be able to provide that Memento from wherever I want to keep it), and get the perspective to load up correctly without me writing a bunch of custom code.

The approach I described above is pretty reasonable, as it requires only a few steps.  What is missing is a PerspectiveFactory that actually works.