Customizing a perspective suitable for RODIN (Rodin Tutorial)

So far, you needed two different perspectives to work with RODIN. But really, it is possible to work with only one perspective. In this section, we try to customize a perspective so that we do not need any other. If you have experience with customizing Eclipse perspectives, you may only want to read the next paragraph which contains a few thoughts about a good perspective for RODIN.

As a start, we should think about what we want the perspective to look like. The proving perspective already is pretty nice. We just could use little bit more editing space and the windows of the Event-B perspective. To create more space, we could move all windows that currently are on both sides of the editing area onto one side, as they never really need to be used simultaneously. For even a bit more space, we could dock all of these windows onto the so-called Fast View Bar, so that they disappear when they are not needed. Like that, there should be enough space to even work split-screen with different components, for example, we could have an abstract machine on one side of the editing surface, and the concrete machine on the other.

Most of the perspective editing is simply drag and drop. First of all, you need to find the Fast View Bar. Usually, it is at the bottom end of the Eclipse window. But it also can be on the side or hidden inside the Shortcut Bar. For our purposes, it probably is best to have it on the right side of the screen. Place it there by dragging it with the mouse. Now, add some items to it. To do that, press the New Fast View button on the bar. It might be useful to leave the Goal, the Problems and the Proof Control window at the bottom of the screen, as you may want them to stay open while editing. A good choice for the Fast view may be:

• Project Explorer,
• Obligation Explorer,
• Search Hypothesis,
• Cache Hypothesis,
• Proof Tree,
• Proof Information
• Progress Window.

Figure 1: Our self-made Quick perspective

All of the windows that you cannot create directly when clicking on the New Fast View Bar can be found in Others/General. Once you are done, the window should look like in Figure 1. Click on “Save Perspective As…” in the Window menu to save the perspective.

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