Custom Eclipse perspective, with initially invisble view stacked to editor area - eclipse

Question

I got a custom perspecitve with an editor area declared in plugin.xml only.
In addtion, I got a custom view, that is opened programatically. I want to stack this view with the editor area.
If I set it in the perspective extension as initially visible, everything works fine.
<view
id="my.viewID"
minimized="false"
relationship="stack"
relative="org.eclipse.ui.editorss"
visible="false">
</view>
However, if I set visible="false", and use the following code to open it programmatically, it always appears in the bottom area stacked with the ConsoleView.
IViewPart viewPart = PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getActiveWorkbenchWindow().getActivePage()
.showView("my.viewID", "secondID", IWorkbenchPage.VIEW_ACTIVATE);
Does anybody know how to have an initially invisble view stacked to the editor area when opened programmatically?
I already tried the recommendations given in this thread but without any success: Eclipse RCP - relative field of view perspective extension not working

Answer 1

Sometimes you can't imagine how simple solutions can be:
Simply adding :* at the end of the view id in the plugin.xml solved this issue:
<view
id="my.viewID:*"
minimized="false"
relationship="stack"
relative="org.eclipse.ui.editorss"
visible="false">
</view>
Unbelievable how many times you find people saying this would not be possible at all...

Answer 2

Well, I've read most stuff about placing a view over the editor area, and none worked. The Answer 1 above causes the plugin.xml to have warnings. In Eclipse Luna, this works however when your perspective is initialized:
public void createInitialLayout(IPageLayout layout) {
if ( layout instanceof org.eclipse.ui.internal.e4.compatibility.ModeledPageLayout ) {
org.eclipse.ui.internal.e4.compatibility.ModeledPageLayout layout4=(org.eclipse.ui.internal.e4.compatibility.ModeledPageLayout)layout;
layout4.stackView(ID+":*",layout.getEditorArea(),false);
}
...
The code above adds a view with "ID" that is a multiple view, added to the stack of editors hidden (last parameter is false="not visible").
It may also work with other Eclipse versions, but I haven't tried it.
Good luck!

Answer 3

The simplest way to achieve this is to add the view to the perspective extensions like this:
<extension point="org.eclipse.ui.perspectiveExtensions">
<perspectiveExtension targetID="org.my.perspective">
<view id="org.my.view"
minimized="false"
relationship="stack"
relative="org.eclipse.ui.editorss"
visible="false">
</view>
</perspectiveExtension>
</extension>
and then calling IWorkbenchPage::showView() without a secondary ID, i.e. only with one argument like this:
PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getActiveWorkbenchWindow().getActivePage().showView("org.my.view");