How to open CFBuilder/FlashBuilder/Eclipse to view a given perspective, from command line
Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.Someone on a list asked an interesting question: how do you switch perspectives in CFBuilder (or FlashBuilder or Eclipse) from the command line? For instance, if one has CFB with FB as a plugin, how might one use the command line to create a shortcut so as to launch to the CFB or FB (or another) perspective?
The good news is that there are in fact various command-line switches for launching Eclipse, and these apply just as well to the cfbuilder.exe and FlashBuilder.exe (for instance, some have needed to use the -clean switch to resolve some problems).
In this case of specifying the desired perspective, we want to use the -perspective argument. The trick, though, is knowing the right value to provide. It's *not* the perspective name. Rather, it's the perspectiveid, and that's not so easy to determine. I'll explain below how I found them, but to cut to the chase, here they are.
I will add though that the -perspective switch needs to be outside of the quotes when you create the shortcut.
For example my install shortcut is "D:\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\FlashBuilder.exe" so doing it like "D:\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\FlashBuilder.exe -perspective com.adobe.ide.coldfusion.perspective.CFML" does not work.
It needs to be "D:\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\FlashBuilder.exe" -perspective com.adobe.ide.coldfusion.perspective.CFML
To be clear, my example works (as is) if it's executed within the directory where the exe lives. I didn't think to go further and show building it with the complete path (and those quotes if needed) but that complete path would of course be needed to create a real shortcut, so thanks for adding that clarification.
To be honest, my focus was on the more significant challenge of specifying the perspectiveid, and finding those. :-) I'll enjoying hearing if that information was helpful to any readers, now or who may find this in the future.
"D:\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\FlashBuilder.exe" -perspective com.adobe.flexbuilder.standalone.product -data @user.home/Adobe Flash Builder 4
"D:\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\FlashBuilder.exe" -perspective com.adobe.ide.coldfusion.perspective.CFML -data @user.home/ColdFusion Builder
Just remember the .exe path is for my install so you will need to change "D:\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4" to your own install path