Workspace and Persistence

Panel Specifications and Instances

A panel registration describes a capability contributed by a plugin.

A panel instance is one live controller and view created from that registration.

The Workspace Manager owns those live instances and their placement in the application grid.

Panel Records

The workspace records enough information to identify and restore an instance, including its plugin, panel registration, geometry, state version, and restore metadata.

Geometry

The workspace owns panel geometry.

A plugin’s default layout is a starting size or placement hint for a newly opened panel. It must not overwrite the geometry restored from a saved layout.

New panels are placed into available workspace space where possible.

Panel State

A controller may expose a small persistence interface such as get_state() and restore_state().

Persisted panel state should contain serialisable user/workflow state, not live runtime objects such as clients, threads, or caches.

Saving and Loading Layouts

Workspace persistence can store information such as:

dataset registrations and mappings;
enabled plugins;
panel instances;
panel geometry;
supported controller state.

Normal layout loading reconciles the saved workspace with the current one: matching instances can be kept, missing instances opened, and surplus instances closed.

Missing Plugins or Panels

A missing plugin should not make an otherwise valid workspace unusable.

The platform can preserve the missing panel’s place with a placeholder so the rest of the layout still loads.

Disposal

Closing a panel must dispose its controller before the workspace record is removed. Disabling a plugin also closes panel instances owned by that plugin.