Switching to the ArchStudio Perspective
ArchStudio runs as a perspective in the eclipse environment. A perspective in the eclipse is an arrangement of different views like a package view and the hierarchy view to adapt eclipse to work on a particular task.
- First thing is to open an ArchStudio perspective by clicking on the ‘open studio’ which is on the top right corner of the open perspective. Once the ArchStudio perspective opens, we come across four quadrants.
Figure 1 ArchStudio Environment
- The upper left quadrant is the “outline view” where in which you can view your documents which are to be edited.
- The right quadrant will show us the “current editor on any document and multiple editors” can be opened at any time.
- The lower left quadrant is the “Navigator view” which is the standard eclipse view that shows all your projects and files.
- The lower right quadrant is a stack set views that display information about different ArchStudio tools.
- The top most view which is used very often is the “ArchStudio Launcher” which is the gateway to all the other ArchStudio tools and also provides user friendly interface for the editors on the documents.
Creating first ArchStudio Project and ArchStudio Architecture Description
ArchStudio projects are similar to eclipse projects. You can create ArchStudio projects in 2 ways.
1. You create by right clicking on the empty navigator view which will be present at the lower left corner and the select the project.
Figure 2 Project Setup
2. You can also select the ‘File’ option from the menu and then select a project.
Figure 3 Project Setup from Menu
3. After clicking on the project, it will open a new project wizard which shows different kinds of projects that wizard supports. Select a ‘General Project’ -> ArchStudio -> ArchStudio Architecture Description -> Click ‘Next’ .
Figure 4 Project Wizard
4. It will display a popup window as shown in below screenshot for creating a new project resource. “Give the name of the project” in the box located and then –> click “Finish”.
Figure 5 Creating Project Name
5. Eclipse will create a new project (with the given project name) which we can see in the navigator view.
- It also creates a default ‘Project file’ which contains all the setting information for the project.
Figure 6 Project NAme Created
Creating an Architecture Description
We can create by using the standard eclipse mechanism or by clicking on the ‘New Architecture Description’ in the ArchStudio launcher.
1. For the standard eclipse mechanism go to your project, right click on it, select ‘new’–>’other’.
Figure 7 Creating a Project
2. Then if you click on other a “New Select a Wizard” window popup then you need to select => “ArchStudio Architecture Description” which is under ArchStudio folder.
3. After that, click “Next”.
Figure 8 Selecting Project Name
4. Then give a file name ArchStudio architecture description has an extension of .xml even if you don’t provide the extension, by default it will take as .xml and click “Finish”.
Figure 9 Architecture Description
In order to open and work with the architecture description, you have to use one of the tools which are listed in the launcher. If you want to open the architecture description, you have to drag it from the navigator view and drop it on to one of the tools and it will open. Once it is done, the outline view and the editor view come up, and we can view the document in the editor. You can have an architecture document open in multiple editors at the same time.
ARCHSTUDIO 5 