Eclipse Plug-in Development – Create a Perspective

A perspective is the container for a set of views and editors. The most commonly used perspective is probably “Java” which contains a set of views for Java development such as a package explorer, an editor, a console, etc. You can switch to another perspective by clicking “Window” -> “Open Perspective”. Switching perspectives let you have different set of views which provide different functions.

Creating a perspective in Eclipse is straightforward. The following are steps for adding a perspective.

1. Create a Plug-in Project

Create a plug-in project by using the wizard.

2. Add Extension Points

Under “Overview” view of your plug-in, click “Extensions” tab. The “Overview” makes plug-in development very easy to do by providing wizards.

Add two extension points by using Extension Wizard: “org.eclipse.ui.perspectives” and “org.eclipse.ui.perspectiveExtensions”. The Wizard makes this easy, but what it really does is changing the plugin.xml file.

After adding the two extension points, the extensions tab looks like the following:

If you go to the plugin.xml file, you can see what are added – perspectives and perspectiveExtensions.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?eclipse version="3.4"?>
<plugin>
   <extension
         point="org.eclipse.ui.perspectives">
      <perspective
            class="sampleperspective.PerspectiveFactory1"
            fixed="true"
            id="SamplePerspective.perspective1"
            name="SamplePerspective">
      </perspective>
   </extension>
   <extension
         point="org.eclipse.ui.perspectiveExtensions">
      <perspectiveExtension
            targetID="SamplePerspective.perspective1">
 
      </perspectiveExtension>
   </extension>
 
</plugin>

3. Add views to perspective

Now a perspective is added, we need to add some views so that the perspective provides some functions. In your plugin.xml file, change the plugin.xml file to the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?eclipse version="3.4"?>
<plugin>
   <extension
         point="org.eclipse.ui.perspectives">
      <perspective
            class="sampleperspective.PerspectiveFactory1"
            fixed="true"
            id="SamplePerspective.perspective1"
            name="SamplePerspective">
      </perspective>
   </extension>
   <extension
         point="org.eclipse.ui.perspectiveExtensions">
      <perspectiveExtension
            targetID="SamplePerspective.perspective1">
            <view
                  id="org.eclipse.jdt.ui.PackageExplorer"
                  minimized="false"
                  moveable="false"
                  ratio="0.5"
                  relationship="left"
                  relative="org.eclipse.ui.console.ConsoleView"
                  visible="true">
            </view>
 
            <view
                  id="org.eclipse.ui.console.ConsoleView"
                  minimized="false"
                  moveable="false"
                  ratio="0.5"
                  relationship="right"
                  relative="org.eclipse.jdt.ui.PackageExplorer"
                  visible="true">
            </view>
 
      </perspectiveExtension>
   </extension>
 
</plugin>

Two views are added in the xml file. Now if you switch back to Extensions tab and click a view, the right side shows the properties you can set for the view.

“minimized” determines whether the view is minimized or not, “ratio” sets the size of the view, “relationship” indicates the placement of the view, etc.

It is strange that if you don’t add view in the plugin.xml file first, the wizard does not show up. But if you add a view, then it is easy to configure the view’s property. So the strategy is add a view in the plugin.xml file. Then go back to the wizard where you not only set view’s attributes, but also find correct id.

4. Add the PerspectiveFactory class, the perspective extension points to. (In plugin.xml file, class=”sampleperspective.PerspectiveFactory1″)

Here it is not necessary to do something, just implements IPerspectiveFactory. The createInitialLayout can add views but we add views through plugin.xml file.

package sampleperspective;
 
import org.eclipse.ui.IPageLayout;
import org.eclipse.ui.IPerspectiveFactory;
 
public class PerspectiveFactory1 implements IPerspectiveFactory {
	@Override
	public void createInitialLayout(IPageLayout layout) {
		// TODO Auto-generated method stub
 
	}
}

Done

Run the plug-in, and in eclipse click “Window” -> “Open Perspective” and select “SamplePerspective”.

The perspective created contains two views – Explorer and Console: