Hello all,

I need a bit of advice on this topic.
We have a bunch of project directories, each of course with their own Focus Project (.gfa) file, and we've stored our project tree in Subversion.

The problem is that those Project Files cause no end of merging conflicts in our version control system.

I don't think we can leave them out of version control althogether, as they store information that allows Developer Studio to see a project at all (I don't think a project shows up in the project tree in Dev Studio if it doesn't have a project file?), which files are part of the project and information about last modification times. It also seems like there are a couple of differences in how, for example, a path gets stored in the Project File; I've seen it use both OS="win" and OS="IBFS", depending on who committed his project file to Subversion.

So on the one hand, it seems that we need these files in version control, but on the other hand they contain information that will be different between different installation locations.

How do people deal with this?

If we leave them out, what kind of problems are we going to run into? If not, how should we deal with conflicts? Which choice did you make?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

The gfa file should not be stored in any source control program.
That file is being accessed (and changed) more than you would think and it does not contain any specific source code that need to be governed. It is just a means of registering which file belongs to this project.

That seems to be the way to go about this. I was leaning to that approach myself, but I wasn't sure.

What I thought would be a major problem for us, namely that a fresh checkout won't contain any project files at all and thus would display an empty project tree in Dev Studio, turns out to be a benefit. If combined with access rights, it means that people who can't access a certain project won't be able to create the associated project file, which in turn means that they can only have projects in the project tree (in Dev Studio) that they have access to.

Also, for deploying projects to our production server, we can use the project files on one particular development environment. We just need to make sure not to delete those... That's only a temporary meaasure anyway, deployment should occur via the version control system - we're just not entirely there yet.

Thanks for the answer

A related question; Is there a way to quickly recreate the project files of the project directories that someone has access to?

I got as far as:

APP LIST HOLD
DEFINE FILE FOCAPPL
	CMD/A255 = ' APP CREATE ' | APPNAME;
END
TABLE FILE FOCAPPL
PRINT CMD
ON TABLE HOLD AS APPCMD FORMAT ALPHA
END
-RUN
-INCLUDE APPCMD.FTM

But that complains that the application folders already exist, for example:
(FOC36306) APPLICATION test ALREADY EXISTS. RUN DELETE FIRST

I'm assuming that if someone doesn't have access, the above would fail and move on to the next app.

Besides, it doesn't provide any means to specify applications that should be added to the app's path.

quote:

for deploying projects to our production server, we can use the project files on one particular development environment

Are you quite sure you want to have projects visible on your production server? In my view these things should only be available on development and test, not on production.

quote:

Is there a way to quickly recreate the project files

What is it that you would want to accomplish with (re)creating the app folders? The APP CREATE command only creates a directory file, nothing more, nothing less.

quote:

Originally posted by GamP:

quote:

for deploying projects to our production server, we can use the project files on one particular development environment

Are you quite sure you want to have projects visible on your production server? In my view these things should only be available on development and test, not on production.

I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote; we need those project files for deployment, as they contain the deployment information. It's contained in the XML. Those project files won't be deployed to the production server of course.

quote:

quote:

Is there a way to quickly recreate the project files

What is it that you would want to accomplish with (re)creating the app folders? The APP CREATE command only creates a directory file, nothing more, nothing less.

I'm trying to make projects that someone has access to visible in Dev Studio without having to click each project and select "New Project...", filling out the fields, adding the right files to the project, etc. I was hoping to script that, and possibly add that script to our SVN repository for others to use as well.