Re: Icons for RDi Perspectives

I saved one of my perspectives as a new perspective, and it did indeed
provide the same icon as the original.
I was then able to jump through hoops to have a different icon:

I edited the workbench.xmi file that Buck mentions. I scanned the xmi for
my new perspective name, and found the iconURI= tag.
In my case this pointed to:
platform:/plugin/com.my.product/icons/perspective.gif
But now it gets complicated. The ' com.my.product ' part of that depends
upon how the vendor may have loaded. It takes a bit of poking around, but
I eventually found the /icons folder, which had the perspective.gif within.

So now that I have the correct /icons folder, I copied a new .gif there,
and in my xmi file I changed the iconURI tag to point to the new .gif.
A restart of the workbench provided the new icon.

I think the difficult part will be finding that /icons folder. If the
com.my.product is loaded directly into your RDi location, just scan through
there.
In my case the product is in a completely different location, and RDi finds
it with a links file. A review of your platform.xml might help narrow it
down (\rdiLocation\SDP\configuration\org.eclipse.update\platform.xml)

On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 2:40 PM Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2/25/2019 12:08 PM, Jon Paris wrote:

I love being able to create my own perspectives - but the utility is

somewhat diminished by the fact that the icon used is the same as that of
the perspective that was modified to make it. That forces me to have the
text showing so that I can differentiate them.

I've done some googling around and all of the instructions for changing

the icons seem to only be applicable to older versions ... or at least the
files that need to be modified don't seem to be present.

Has anyone had any luck doing this?

No luck. The internals are quite intricate. There's a config file
(workspace
directory/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.e4.workbench/workbench.xmi)
that tells Eclipse where to find the icon, but the iconURI that it
refers to isn't obviously any place I can find in the file system.

I can find eg system_persp.gif inside of the hierarchy where RDi/Eclipse
is loaded. In Windows, that might be Program Files, but I put mine in
/ibm. So the tree to find the icons is
/ibm/rdi96/configuration/.settings/org.eclipse.osgi/some small number
like 1311/0/.cp/icons/full/cview16/system_persp.gif Unfortunately, if I
start with -clean, all those numbered directories get... refreshed.
Apparently from the original .jar files, where the original icons are
placed by the developer.

If I could figure out where the cross-reference is between the xmi file
and the physical (semi-temporary) location of the icon, I could probably
figure out how to change the icon for eg my copy of the RSE perspective.
But I haven't got that far, and I'm not sure what to do once I hit
-clean and it all goes away.

FWIW, I was able to edit the system_persp.gif file and make it look
different on the RDi toolbar. But that different icon is identical for
the stock RSE perspective and also my copy. I wonder if there's a way to
reach out and touch the icon with a plug-in? I'd need to do a lot more
digging into the internals of Eclipse.

So... nothing really to add, but I did look.

--
--buck

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