Description Mark Powell 2007-03-08 14:58:05 EST

In my RCP application we use several perspectives and want to continue to use perspectives for editors and views and so forth.  However, we would like one of our perspectives to behave like a tabbed web browser like MSIE or Firefox.  We are able to specify a folder with a placeholder to get a particular ViewPart, and let the user open multiple instances of the view in the folder, which is great.  We can set the ViewParts to be closeable, which is great except that when you close the last view in the folder, the workbench reallocates the folder space back to the other WorkbenchParts.

What we would like would be a way to either make the last view not closeable, or to let the folder area remain where it is and not be consumed in favor of the other WorkbenchParts.  Our strong preference would be the former, as that would produce a behavior quite similar to Firefox or IE.

You'll probably ask "why not use EditorPart, since that's how they work?", to which my answer is that we're already using an EditorPart for something critically important, and the 1-editor-area-per-perspective prevents us from doing this.  We need this tabbed-browser area to be visible next to the editor, therefore we are trying to do this with ViewParts.