CS Studio Perspectives

How to create a new display perspective

1. Open fresh "OPI Runtime" perspective: Window/Open Perspective/Other/OPI Runtime. "Reset" if it was already active.
2. Open views, position them as desired.
3. Invoke "Save As" context menu on the perspective.

You can now close the perspective, later re-open it, or switch between perspectives.

After closing or moving views, either
a) "Reset" the perspective to revert to the original layout
b) Use "Save As" with a new name for a new perspective, or under the same name to overwrite the existing perspective.

Perspective preferences:

Layout of the "OPI Runtime" Perspective

The OPI Runtime perspective has part stacks named CENTER, TOP, BOTTOM, LEFT, RIGHT which are positioned as one would guess. When an action is configured to open an *.opi to the "left", it will be placed in the LEFT part stack.

When these part stacks are empty, they are invisible and it is thus impossible to manually move displays into them. A display can be positioned "left" from the center, but the actual LEFT part stack would be even further to the left.

The preference option to "Show OPI Runtime Stacks" adds one placeholder view in each part stack, which helps positioning views in those stacks. Remember, however, to close the placeholder views when done!

Association of View to their input

Views track their current input (path to *.opi, macros) in the RCP 'Memento', which is part of the 'persisted state' of the underlying E4 model. Perspectives track the IDs and positions of their views, and each view obtains its input from its memento.

This works perfectly for allowing to restore the last known state of the workbench after a CS-Studio restart. When opening a previously closed perspective, its views and their location are restored as well, but note that this will use the last known input for each view.

Example: Create a new perspective, place 'main.opi' in center, save as MAIN perspective, close perspective.

Open MAIN perspective: Restored as saved.

Open MAIN perspective, close 'main.opi', 'Reset' perspective: Restored as saved.

Open MAIN perspective, use an action button in 'main.opi' to navigate to 'subsystem.opi': From now on, the MAIN perspective will show 'subsystem.opi' in the center, because the perspective tracks the view, and the view then tracks its most recent input.

There is at this time no way to define an "original" input, to prevent the OPI View from saving changes to its input that result from navigating to other displays.

Multiple Windows

If you want displays to be outside of the original workbench window, there are three options:

1. 'Detach' by dragging it outside of the workbench. Detached windows belong to the current perspective of their origin window. They open/close with perspective changes.

2. Open display in new workbench (or move to another existing workbench). Each workbench has its own perspective.

3. Standalone Window (shell) Not part of any perspective, will not be persisted over application restarts.