Description Eugene Ostroukhov 2006-03-21 09:48:40 EST

GEF introduced interesting view mechanics for its palette view - the view can either be a standalone view or embedded into the editor area.
I see this feature a very useful for other views as well. I.e. there is little use for the property view in JDT Java editor but some other (graphical) editors are useless without it. Some editors don't support the outline view while others will benefit of having it open all the time. It is hard for the user to define a perspective layout that will suit both the Java source editing and VE editing.

The way I see this feature:
1. Editor plugin developer defines the views that can be embedded into the editor (i.e. using IEditorSite calls passing the view ID and the desired position).
2. If the view is open it behaves the same way it does now.
3. If the view is closed it's contents is visualized in editor the same way embedded GEF palette is. If the view is not registered on step 1, it is not added to the editor area.

I see that most often the views used for the embedding are the PageBook-derivates.