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A perspective is a group of views and editors in the Design Studio window. One or more perspectives can exist in a single Design Studio window. Each perspective contains one or more views and editors. Within a window, each perspective may have a different set of views but all perspectives share the same set of editors. You can think of a perspective is a visual organization of the windows within a workspace. The default Design Studio configuration contains a single Perspective name "Pentaho". Note that the active perspective is displayed in the upper right hand corner of the Design Studio. The Pentaho perspective is a very simple perspective containing the Package Explorer view and an area reserved for the editor.
Action Sequence Editor
Activities that the Pentaho BI platform performs are defined by Action Sequence XML documents. Action Sequences define activities such as database queries, report generation, email actions and the order in which they occur. Data can be passed between Actions within an Action Sequence or between executions of other Action Sequences. They define the inputs that must be available prior to execution, the processes that will be performed and the outputs that will be available to other Action Sequences after execution is complete.
The Pentaho Action Sequence Editor is an Eclipse plugin which allows the user to create and edit action sequences within their Pentaho solutions. From within the Design studio let's quickly create a new action sequence and take a look at how it appears within the editor. Select the Default Project within the Package Explorer view on the left side of the Design Studio. From the toolbar at the top of the Design Studio select "New Action Sequence" from the Pentaho Toolbar Item. The Action Sequence Wizard should appear. From the Template pulldown select Sample Burst Action then select Finish. A new action sequence editor should open displaying the contents of the action sequence we just created. Now let's take a look at the various parts of the action sequence editor.