Why is this Eclipse RCP plugin missing a view? - eclipse-plugin

Question

I am experimenting with the way an Eclipse RCP application is dealing with its plugins. In Eclipse IDE I created an Eclipse RCP 3.x project with a view that generated all the necessary files and worked just fine.
Assuming that I can transform this application into one that only holds an empty perspective just by removing the respective parts of the plugin.xml file, I commented out all the lines that deal with the view like so:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?eclipse version="3.4"?>
<plugin>
<extension
id="application"
point="org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications">
<application>
<run
class="pluginwithview.Application">
</run>
</application>
</extension>
<extension
point="org.eclipse.ui.perspectives">
<perspective
name="Perspective"
class="pluginwithview.Perspective"
id="PluginWithView.perspective">
</perspective>
</extension>
<!--
even without these lines
there's an Exception thrown saying:
"Could not create the view: PluginWithView.view
-->
<!-- <extension
point="org.eclipse.ui.views">
<view
name="View"
inject="true"
class="pluginwithview.View"
id="PluginWithView.view">
</view>
</extension>
<extension
point="org.eclipse.ui.perspectiveExtensions">
<perspectiveExtension
targetID="*">
<view
standalone="true"
minimized="false"
relative="org.eclipse.ui.editorss"
relationship="left"
id="PluginWithView.view">
</view>
</perspectiveExtension>
</extension> -->
<extension
point="org.eclipse.ui.menus">
<menuContribution
locationURI="menu:org.eclipse.ui.main.menu">
<menu
label="File">
<command
commandId="org.eclipse.ui.file.exit"
label="Exit">
</command>
</menu>
</menuContribution>
</extension>
</plugin>
But instead of displaying an empty perspective, the app now looks like so:
What must I do to not have the application search for the view ? Is there a config file that I am missing ? (I know there a few reasons to not have a view , but right now I am mainly interested in the inner workings of an Eclipse RCP application)

Answer 1

Perspectives remember the views they contained. If you change the perspective definition you will have to do a perspective reset ('Window > Perspective > Reset Perspective') to get it to read the updated definition.
For testing you can also specify the -clean and -clearPersistedState options in the 'Program Arguments' section of the RCP Run Configuration to discard all saved information.