Sharing and Archiving Projects

From FDT Documentation

Revision as of 12:15, 14 September 2010 by Aklement (Talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

Sharing and Archiving Projects 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 - in case they want to come back to it and have things instantly ready to go.

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. 3. Both can use FDT’s saved Launch Configuration preferences.

Exporting Projects The quickest way to transfer or archive projects is to use FDT’s built in Project Export/Import wizard. Using the wizard is very easy.

First thing to do is to make sure the target project or projects 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.

To start either chose File>Export or right click within the Flash Explorer and select Export...

What will appear is the Export Wizard. There are lots of options available, but to share projects, focus on these two options: Archive File and File System. Using both is the largely the same - the main difference is this output option. If outputing with Archive FIle FDT will compress all selected project into one file, whereas exporting with File System will just copy the files and folders to the selected location.

When ready to export, begin by selecting which projects you’d like to export. Again, if a project is closed within the Flash Explorer, it will not appear within the Export Wizard.

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

When ready to export, click browse to select a destination. In this case, the export will be to a zip file. Give a name for the zip file. When ready, hit finish and FDT will export the selected resources.

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

If the projects were exported using the File System option, choose Select root directory. If the projects were exported via an archive file, like earlier in this video, choose Select archive file. When ready, click browse and choose the target file or directory.

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

Creating and Sharing Projects with SVN

FDT ships with a SVN client pre-installed. This allows for two powerful work-flow features.

1. Easily create projects into a repository 2. Check out existing projects from a repository

Create A Project Into A Repository If a developer knows she wants to use SVN to version her project. She can start off the project already integrated with a repository. Begin by making sure the SVN Repository Exploring perspective is active. Do this by either going to Window>Open Perspective or by clicking on the Open Perspective button.

Create a reference to the desired repository by right clicking within the SVN Repositories view and selecting New>Repository Location...

Enter the repository URL and user credentials. When the repository reference is ready, create a folder within the repository that will house your project.

Now it’s time to create our project. Right click on the desired folder and choose Find/Check Out As...

Choose Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard. Choose New Flash Project and the familiar New Flash Project will appear.

Create your project. FDT will now check out this folder from the repository, add it into your workspace, and add the files and folders that were pre-defined in the project template.

You can tell that this is a versioned project, by the SVN Respository icon here, as well as the URL of the respositroy next to it.

Taking a closer look, these question marks next to the files and folders are visible. This means that these folders and files exist within the workspace, but not in the remote repository.

Get FDT5