I was given the advice to dock the snippet editor to the right of the source/design/preview view here:
and that is a very good idea.
However, when I close designer that workspace UI layout (it’s called a “perspective” in Eclipse iirc) is lost. I have to recreate this every time I open Designer. In Eclipse I am able to save customs perspectives via menu:
Window > Perspective > Save Perspective As...
How can this be achieved in Connect Designer?
Thanks!
This option is not available in the Designer application.
Can you please explain in what kind of situation such an option would be very useful? Because to be honest, to me it doesn’t sound that much of an issue to drag-and-drop the snippet editor to the right when viewing it in the Workspace pane to make it available next to the main editor each time I open a Template in the Designer application.
Almost all complex software solutions offer rearrangement of the UI to adapt it to personal preferences and workflow. Eclipse does it, Netbeans does it, Cinema 4D does it, Blender does it, Photoshop does it (almost all Adobe applications to be precise), even Connect Workflow allows the rearrangement of almost all Windows inside the main program window (and often the software even allows to save multiple window arrangements for multiple tasks that can then be selected via menu or dropdown). This is a question of usability and UX and is standard in a lot of software for years.
The kind of situation is to change the workspace to my needs without having to do it all over again at every start of the application (creating unnecessary clicks and being highly annoying). Especially seeing that Objectif Lune UI developers deemed it useful in PP Suite 7 in Workflow and Designer and continued to do it in Connect Workflow I would say you could ask your colleagues why they did it and why they think it’s useful.
Thank you for your feedback. I’ve added your request to our backlog for further consideration (internal ref SHARED-90580). We appreciate your input and if you have any more suggestions, feel free to share them with us.
Erik
What Eclipse calls a perspective consists of view states and positions relative to the editor area. It does not include information about editors and where they are docked.
We already save the last known perspective in the workspace folder. If you change the position of a view and close and reopen the designer, the view will be where you left it. It would be relatively easy to implement a feature that would allow users to save and load perspectives to and from arbitrary files, but this would not include information about editors.
Normally Eclipse keeps editors open when it is closed, so you get the same editor state when you reopen the application. We deliberately disabled this functionality because we want the welcome screen to be the first thing a user sees when they start the designer. I looked into it but I was not able to find a way to override this in an installed product. If you would like to google for yourself, the relevant keywords are “org.eclipse.ui/CLOSE_EDITORS_ON_EXIT” and “plugin_customization.ini”.
Even if it were possible to keep editors open, it would not be all that useful since the designer is only capable of opening a single template editor at a time. This is a very awkward limitation, and we have tried to get rid of it in the past, but sadly we were not able to.
@Sander I also think that it is a major flaw that only one template can be open. If you want to migrate elements from one template to another this “flaw” makes that very cumbersome.
In Suite 7 I was able to open multiple instances of Designer to do that. But Connect Designer refuses to open multiple times. You could remove this restriction to make work a little easier if you are not able to implement multiple open templates.
About the “Welcome Window”: Personally I think these “welcome Windows” are more of a nuisance than a help and often company just try to force advertising onto me with them. A way around this would be to show the “welcome window” in a tab in the actual template editor UI or to make it optional. Functionality would be nearly the same with the first option, but UI layouts could be saved, as with other modern applications.
Now I have a related problem. If I dock out a snippet editor, it comes up empty after the next start and now I can neither remove that empty area (no close button) nor can I get the editor to open in it.
Not even “reset perspective” works.
This issue can be solved by executing the following steps:
I beg you pardon, I only tested it with a Template.
In your situation you can execute the following steps instead:
It only works if I close template tab AND datamapping tab. Sigh. If I do not close them explicitly the empty area is back after restart. That looks like a UI bug to me.
So there is no way to get rid of that empty area without closing the template and datamapper tabs, correct?
