Perspectives

A perspective defines the layout of the user interface. Snow Owl comes with a set of pre-defined perspectives for different use cases.

The default perspectives are:

You can select a perspective by choosing Window > Open Perspective. Alternatively, click on one of the perspective icons located at the top right corner of the main toolbar to active a perspective.

Customize your perspective

In addition to the available perspective layouts, you can also rearrange the user interface in a way that helps you perform your tasks in the most efficient way and create your own perspective based on that. This allows working with different layouts for different use cases or tasks. For example, when mapping SNOMED CT concepts to ICD-10 codes, it may be useful to have the SNOMED CT Concepts view on the far-left side of the screen, the ICD-10 view on the far-right side of the screen, and the editor window between them to simplify dragging and dropping concepts to the map editor.

To create a new perspective

  • Change the layout of the user interface (e.g. by closing views, moving views to different positions, resizing views or editors).

  • Once you are happy with the layout, go to Window > Save Perspective As... and enter a name for the new perspective. Click OK.

A new icon will be automatically added to the main toolbar allowing you to easily access your saved perspective.

The icon depends on the perspective you started out from.

Example

If you changed the look of the authoring perspective, an owl icon will be added to the toolbar; the original icon for the authoring perspective will be hidden. If you started out from the reference set perspective, a reference set icon will be used for your custom perspective, and the default icon for the reference set perspective will be hidden.

To activate a perspective, go to Window > Open Perspective... and select the perspective that you want to display. The respective button will be present in the toolbar as well. This way you can display default perspectives as well as customized perspectives.

Hover over the icons to see which perspective it refers to.

If you would like to reset your current layout to the default settings, go to Window > Reset Perspective...