Introduction to Concepts

Workbench

The term Workbench refers to the desktop development environment. The Workbench aims to achieve seamless tool integration and controlled openness by providing a common paradigm for the creation, management, and navigation of workspace resources.

Each Workbench window contains one or more perspectives. Perspectives contain views and editors and control what appears in certain menus and toolbars.

Resources

Resources is a collective term for the projects, folders, and files that exist in the Workbench. The navigation views provide a hierarchical view of resources and allow you to open them for editing.

Other tools may display and handle these resources differently.

There are three basic types of resources that exist in the Workbench:

Files

Comparable to files as you see them in the file system.

Folders

Comparable to directories on a file system. In the Workbench, folders are contained in projects or other folders. Folders can contain files and other folders.

Projects

Contain folders and files. Projects are used for sharing and resource organization. Like folders, projects map to directories in the file system. (When you create a project, you specify a location for it in the file system.)

A project is either open or closed. When a project is closed, it cannot be changed in the Workbench. The resources of a closed project do not appear in the Workbench, but the resources still reside on the local file system.
Closed projects require less memory. When a project is open, the structure of the project can be changed and you will see the contents.
Folders and files can be linked to locations in the file system outside of the project's location. These special folders and files are called linked resources.

Resource Hierarchies

Resources are stored and displayed in the Workbench in hierarchies. Described below are the terms used when referring to resources that are stored and displayed in a hierarchical structure.

Root

The top level of the Workbench contents (in the file system).

Parent resource

Any resource containing another resource. Only projects and folders can be parent resources.

Child resource

Any resource that is contained within another resource. Only files and folders can be child resources.

Resource hierarchies are displayed in the Project Explorer view, which is one of the default views in the RT-LAB Edition perspective.

Linked Resources

Linked resources are files and folders stored in locations in the file system outside of the project's location. These special resources can be used to add files and folders to your project that for whatever reason must be stored in a certain place outside of your project.

You can even use linked resources to overlap other resources in the workspace, so resources from one project can appear in another project. If you do want to have overlapping resources in your workspace, do so with caution. Keep in mind that this means changing a resource in one place will cause simultaneous changes in the duplicate resource. Deleting one duplicate resource will delete both!

Deleting a linked resource does not cause the corresponding resource in the file system to be deleted. However, deleting child resources of linked folders causes them to be removed from the file system.

Working Sets

Working sets group elements for display in views or for operations on a set of elements. The Project Explorer view uses working sets to restrict the set of resources that are displayed. If a working set is selected in the view, only resources, children of resources, and parents of resources contained in the working set are shown. When using the search facility, you can also use working sets to restrict the set of elements that are searched.

Different views provide different ways to specify a working set. The Working Set of the Project Explorer view is specified in the Working Sets menu of the pull-down menu of the Project Explorer view and is initially empty. Views that support working sets typically use the following working set selection dialog to manage existing working sets and to create new working sets:

When you create a new working set you can choose from different types of working sets. In the example below, you can create a resource working set or a breakpoint working set.

If you create a new resource working set you will be able to select the working set resources as shown below. The same wizard is used to edit an existing working set. Different types of working sets provide different kinds of working set editing wizards.

Note: Newly created resources are not automatically included in the active working set. They are implicitly included in a working set if they are children of an existing working set element. If you want to include other resources after you have created them you have to explicitly add them to the working set.

Local history

The local edit history of a file is maintained when you create or modify a file using the RT-LAB editors. Each time you edit and save the file, a copy is saved so that you can replace the current file with a previous edit or even restore a deleted file. You can also compare the contents of all the local edits. Each edit in the local history is uniquely represented by the date and time the file was saved. Only files have local history; projects and folders do not.

Perspectives

Each Workbench window contains one or more perspectives. A perspective defines the initial set and layout of views in the Workbench window. Within the window, each perspective shares the same set of editors. Each perspective provides a set of features aimed at accomplishing a specific type of task or works with specific types of resources. For example, the RT-LAB Edition perspective combines views that you would commonly use while editing an RT-LAB model, while the Debug perspective contains the views that you would use while debugging Python scripts. As you work in the

Workbench, you will probably switch perspectives frequently.

Perspectives control what appears in certain menus and toolbars. They define visible action sets, which you can change to customize a perspective. You can save a perspective that you build in this manner, making your own custom perspective that you can open again later.

Note: If you load a workspace from RT-LAB 11.x in an older version, some components may present error messages.

This may happen if you are using perspectives or components (views or editors) from RT-LAB 11.x that do not exist in older versions.

Fixing this is quite simple: you should close the incompatible views and editors, close all perspectives and then reopen them.

This may happen only when migrating from RT-LAB 11.x to older versions