I'm developing an eclipse plug-in and I would like to open files with a certain extension (e.g. .xml) with the View tab of my plug-in. Is this possible? I know this can be done for editors like this In plug-in.xml how to associate a file extension with a particular kind of editor in eclipse plug-in.
The difference between a View and an Editor has diminished with Eclipse 4. This means that you can dock editors outside the shared area on a view stack. Go ahead and try it by dragging an Editor by its title and dropping it on a view stack.
Furthermore, it is very well possible to edit files in views if you want to implement this yourself. For this to happen you have to implement ISaveablePart [1] on the view. When you implement this, the view will play in the change/dirty/save editor lifecycle of the workbench.