Sharing and Archiving Projects

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FDT offers various ways to share and archive your projects. This is nearly essential when working within a team environment and useful when developers want a way to archive their projects while keeping all their settings intact.

FDT 4 now has a powerful and unique feature: by default it creates a project configuration file and saves it into your project. This allows specific project settings to be saved and even transferred between FDT users.

There are two primary ways to share projects.

  1. Importing and Exporting project folders or compressed project folders.
  2. Using a revision control system such as SVN or GIT.

Both can use FDT’s saved Launch Configuration preferences.

Exporting Projects

First thing to do is to make sure the target project(s) are open. To open a project that is closed, right click on the project icon within the Flash Explorer and select ‘Open Project’ or just double click on it [1].

To start, either chose File>Export [2] from the menu bar or right click within the Flash Explorer and select Export... [3].

What will appear is the Export Wizard [4]. There are lots of options available, but to share projects, focus on these two options:

  • Archive File
  • File System


Using both is the largely the same. If outputing with Archive File FDT will compress all selected project(s) into one file, whereas exporting with File System will just copy the files and folders to the selected location.

For this example, we're going to export via an Archive File, so select that [5].

Next, we need to choose which projects to export. Again, if a project is closed within the Flash Explorer, it will not appear within the Export Wizard [6].

If desired, certain directories can be selectively excluded from export. This is useful if a project contains source code or assets that a you may not wish to share [7].

When ready to export, click Browse... to select a destination [8]. In this case, the export will be to a .ZIP file. Give a name for the .ZIP file [9]. When ready, hit Finish and FDT will export the selected resources [10].

Importing Projects

Importing projects is even simpler than exporting them. Begin by choosing Import from either the File menu [11] or by right clicking within the Flash Explorer [12]. This time, there is just one option to take note of, and that is Existing Projects into Workspace [13]. Choose that and click Next.

If the projects were exported using the File System option, choose Select root directory [14]. If the projects were exported via Archive File, like earlier in this tutorial, choose Select Archive File [15]. When ready, click Browse... [16] and choose the target file or directory [17].

When selected, FDT will scan for valid projects and show them here [18]. If none are found, No projects are found to import will be displayed here [19].

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