We are brand new to DevStudio and have virtual projects created for each datasource. In each master folder exists the .mas for the specific datasource. What we'd like to do is have the original "master" .mas file stored somewhere to remain untouched. We do not want developers adding defines to the original, but want them to create their own copy of the .mas for their specific project needs.

Does anyone have any standards in place for doing this sort of thing? I'd be interested in learning what others have done for their implementation. THANKS.

what I would do is create a folder for each developer and then a profile (.prf) file for each developer. I the profile use the APP command and pre-append the developers folder to the front of the APP PATH so that the reporting server see there copy first. Then make the original file read only for everyone (except the individual that will be resp. for making changes) hope this helps.

When setting up your project, click on the properties tab and you can concatenate up to 7 virtual or real folders. If you put the original masters in one folder that in a real folder with read only security at a lower level of the concatentation, then let each user have their own directory at the highest level of the concatenation. The user could copy the master into their own folder and do whatever they need.
It works for us!

If your working outside of the projects area you could say

APP PREPENDPATH user_masters secured_masters
to pick up the user masters first in the path.
Good Luck!

Thanks for the replies! Texas - We have folders created for each developer but, I apologize, I am not sure what a profile is or how to create one (when we purchased WebFOCUS we were told we didn't need to know a thing about FOCUS code - maybe that's where the problem lies - that we're new to FOCUS).
Carol - Sorry, but I'm not seeing anything in the folder properties relating to concatenation. We are not using local projects, but are using "Projects on Development Environment" (remote). Currently we have folders created which contain the original masters (a folder for each datasource). When we created the developer folders, we were prompted to select the directories from which to use the masters from. For instance my folder, Kathy, has .mas files from all 3 datasource folders where the location points to the original folder from which they reside. Even though we do have read-only attributes assigned on the original master folders at the server/directory level, the original masters are getting changed by the developers. I think I'm missing something when you're speaking about concatenation.

I was referring to Projects on servername in Developer Studio. If you right click on Projects, Add a new Project, you can concatenate 6 or 7 folders together. Once your Project is set up, you can right click on the little red suitcase, and concatenate/change folders with the properties tab.

We're using DevStudio 5.2.4

Sorry for the confusion, I think this is a different setup than the one you're using!