Question

Do someone has an Idea, how to implement a Layout in RCP,
where the Views would look like Tabs and appear nested?

The Tabs should have all the advantages of Views – can be dragged to the desktop to become a detached view, be tiled near each other, rearranged etc.

On the picture the views: View4 and View5 are nested into View1.

Answer 1

In my experience, something like this will not be easy – there’s likely going to be a lot of custom coding in your future. I’ll try to cover this more from a high level architecture standpoint, since there’ll be a lot of details you’ll need to figure out specific to your requirements and strengths.

There’s two ways you can go about this I think:

1. write a view extension where the contents of that view are other views.

This would be less work up front, but might be harder to get view rearrangement to work. Based on your mockup, this means View1 is an instance of this view, and is responsible for rendering the tab controls for View4/View5, and telling those views to render their content. You can probably look at MultiPageEditorPart for some inspiration, though you’ll probably want to render the tabs a bit nicer.

In this case, your subviews will likely plug in specifically to their parent view. Drag and drop support within the view wouldn’t be too bad, though pulling them out of the view would involve a bit of work. This article provides a basic intro to drag-and-drop; google can provide the rest.

2. write a custom presentation to render your views in this way.

This one might be a bit more work up front to learn about how the presentation layer works, but once that is done, it will probably be easier to get all the features you’re looking for. See this article for an introduction to presentation layers.

In this case, all your views will be treated by the plugin system as top level views – your presentation layer decides where to render the areas for the view contents. I’ve used presentation layer for something similar to this, but in my case, the views were all statically positioned. That said, since everything is a regular view, you should be able to re-use the existing drag-and-drop functionality to rearrange views with a lot less effort than the other option.