Introduction to Eclipse Riena UI and Navigation

Starting out with Eclipse Riena?  I hope you find my one-picture-summary of the Riena UI and navigation useful:

Conceptually the window is divided into the navigation tree on the left - showing a navigation model - and the work area on the right - showing the view that is currently active. Other window areas are the menu bar, the coolbar and the status bar.

The navigation tree shows the navigation model of the current SubApplication and can change during run-time (for example elements can be added / removed). Conceptually it is a tree constructed like this:

1 Riena Application  - root of the navigation tree; non-interactive > 1-n SubApplications - each sub application has a clickable tab in the top part of the window » 1-n ModuleGroups - groups several modules together; non-interactive »> 1-n Modules - has a title (blue background) and 1-n SubModules »» 1-n SubModules - is associated with a View and Controller. When a SubModule becomes selected the corresponding View is shown in the work area. SubModules can be nested. If module has just one SubModule it is not shown.

As you can see, Riena steps away a bit from perspectives, views, editors in favor of a task oriented interaction (side note: underneath this we use views and perspectives, and we support integration of regular views). For example you could have a SubApplication called “Customers”, with a Search Module and additional Modules for each of the customers you are currently editing:

For the full details read the excellent ‘Riena Navigation’ page on the Riena wiki. The wiki explains this in more detail and shows how to create the navigation structure through Java code or the plugin.xml file.