[Tips] Copy Eclipse Workspace Settings

It doesn't take very many hours of coding in Servoy's Eclipse development environment before you inevitably start down the path of customizing it to your liking. I'd go so far as to say it is almost a prerequisite to becoming truly comfortable and efficient with Servoy.

Little things like turning off "Show Text" on perspective icons:

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to turning on hidden gems like "Show Source of Selected Element Only" in the outline view:

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to a full reorganization of your debug perspective:

[image unavailable: Picture 4] These are the types of customizations that make you a Servoy pro (or at least qualify you to play one on TV). They also take a bit of time to setup.

What to do then when you setup a fresh install of Servoy? You can either manually reset up your workspace, or you can copy your Eclipse workspace settings from an old/established workspace to your new workspace.

Steps (from new install):

Before you do this, install any perspectives and views that weren't installed by Servoy that you have setup in your preferred workspace. SVN perspective is an example.

Also, "open" all perspectives (make sure the perspective icons are visible in the top bar) of your source workspace. Unopened perspectives sometimes don't get copied over.

1 Temporarily switch workspace to an old/established workspace that you want to copy settings from (File > Switch Workspace > Other... > select a workspace).

2 Switch workspace back to your new workspace (same place), but this time make sure "Workbench Layout" under "Copy Settings" is selected:

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3 At this point, you have to do a couple of cleanup tasks. If you had "Show Text" on perspective icons turned off, you'll have to turn it off again (pic above).

4 Lastly, go to each perspective and save it to the default name (Window > Save Perspective As... > choose name of current perspective > save).This way, if you ever go to (Window > Reset Perspective...) you won't reset your perspective back to Servoy's default.

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Something to save you time when setting up new Servoy developer instances.

Comments (3)

John Allen 2010-07-09

I'm just starting to try to really dive into Servoy 4/5 instead of jumping back and forth between 3.5 (completed projects) and 4/5 new projects. I thought I could just export my workspace setup including perspectives and preference settings and then import them into my new workspace. I guess that is just preferences?

David Workman 2010-07-09

Just checked again and you are absolutely correct. I've missed the "Export All" option every time I've been by here. So, "File > Export > General > Preferences > Export All" (and then import into new workspace) definitely does the trick and much better. Thanks John.

David Workman 2010-07-13

Further testing: there is an issue with the export/import preferences approach and I'm not quite sure what the deal is. The result though is that the window arrangement of perspectives is not brought over in all cases. Another issue is that the export file saves the workspace as well so on importing it without changing that string to your new workspace then after a restart you will be inadvertently pointing to the wrong workspace. *Ouch* :) So I'm back to the approach outlined in this tip...for now.