[news.eclipse.platform.rcp] Hiding (closing) a view

[Mike Higginbotham <higginmi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

We have several perspectives in our RCP app. One of the perspectives has 
a view that is always displayed (the parent) and can have several other 
views displayed (children). We want to close these child views whenever 
the user switches to another perspective. The way we found to implement 
this was for the parent view to listen for perspectiveActivated events 
and to tell the children to close using a mechanism we had in place for 
closing the children via a "close all" button in the perspective. The 
children close by executing:

PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getActiveWorkbenchWindow().getActivePage().hideView(this);

This worked great for our "close all" button. Initially, this did not 
work for perspectiveActivated because by the time the perspective got 
the activated event (telling it that it was no longer active), the 
hideView would fail because the underlying code will only hide a view 
for the active perspective - the view we were trying to hide would not 
be found. We solved this by closing the views the next time the 
perspective became activated - a little backwards but serviceable.

For those of you who have stuck with me through this long discourse, I 
have some questions:

1. Is there a better way for a view to hide itself than
   PlatformUI...hideView?
2. Can you hide views that are not in the current perspective?
   If not, does anyone know why?

Thanks in advance for your responses,
Mike Higginbotham