I've installed Jaspersoft Studio 6.2.2 in order to edit a couple of existing Jasper reports. Unless I missed something, nowhere in Getting Started documentation do they explain the basic terms specific to this program. They do explain the generic Jasper terms (report, data adapter, field...) but, when it comes to Jaspersoft Studio, they just instruct you to launch wizards and use the defaults. That isn't optimal for me because I prefer to have my work under source control and separated by customer/client rather than having everything together in a local folder within my Windows profile. I also have the impression that they omit stuff because they assume you're familiar with Eclipse (I'm not).
Could you please provide me with a quick overview of the basic terms and some tips about how to use them to effectively organise work:
Workspace
Project
Project Folder
... and some other I might be missing?
My view:
A workspace is a group projects that share some configuration/environment. In project setting, you can use a common workspace configuration or define a project specific configuration.
In java world, e.g. you can define different JDK compatibility per workspace.
In jasper world, e.g. for Chinese projects, you can have projects that all have zh_CN default language set when executing preview. Different fonts might be used in this workspace. No need to set it up for every new project created.
Every workspace has it's own set of data adapters and JRS server connections.
I usually have sources under "Project folder", not in workspace folder. I just import a project into the workspace (do not copy).
BTW. One project can be in multiple workspaces.
Related
What is a "safe" way to share an Eclipse workspace between two computers? I've had problems using Dropbox and I've had problems using Github. I am looking for a best practice that will "just work".
Update
I read below and many other places that sharing a workspace doesn't work. But my collection includes 50 projects, are you saying that I need to create 50 github repos? There's no way to put them all in one repo to save the repetition?
Solution (imperfect, but still improving)
My collection of projects is in a github repo called projects/ which includes 50 subdirectories, each structured appropriately as they would be for an eclipse project.The /projects directory doesn't have meta-data or any other eclipse info (AFAIK)
Separately, in ~ I create a brand new Eclipse workspace. And then I "manually" import each one with Eclipse. I do this on each machine that needs to access those projects via Eclipse.
No, the workspace will contain machine-specific information and locations. Share the projects themselves, preferably through a source code management system like git. If anything in the project refers to something outside the workspace, you'll want it changed to refer to that resource in a portable way (e.g. pick the JRE using an Execution Environment instead by name).
Look at the thread at https://stackoverflow.com/a/37799711/10235188. They describe how to share a workspace and configurations between machines. Otherwise you'll always have problems with absolute paths.
What is the best way to share project specific settings between multiple Eclipse projects?
I'm working with an application that is divided into several Eclipse projects. All of the Eclipse projects should use the same compiler settings. I could duplicate the settings in all the projects, but I'm looking for a way to avoid that.
The relevant settings are the ones that are saved in <PROJECT_LOC>/.settings, most importantly org.eclipse.jdt.core.prefs but also for example org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs. They are the ones that are set in Project Properties > Java Compiler, Java Code Style (and a few more places).
The solution must be version control friendly.
One possible solution use a linked resource, from org.eclipse.jdt.core.prefs or .settings of the projects to the same file, located in one of the projects. A similar solutions is to use soft file system links. I don't really like these solutions, it seems to me that they are hard to maintain, for example if the name of a project is changed.
I found this question which is different because it asks about sharing settings between developers, not between projects. (I must do both.)
How to share Eclipse project preferences between users?
I think it depends on how frequently you expect projects settings to change.
If not frequently, you shouldn't over-engineer your solution: just configure one project and copy settings to other projects, put everything under version control and you're done, except for having to perform this operation again every other year, or so.
If frequently, and if a lot of settings are involved, and if all (most) workspace projects should indeed use the same settings, then consider creating your own Oomph setup, that would include your settings as workspace settings. Then let all projects just use the workspace settings. (Of course a few projects could still deviate and use their own project settings, but once using project specific settings, changes to workspace settings will have no effect on that project).
BTW: Oomph includes capabilities to also specify once and for all: selection of plug-ins to install plus how to populate a workspace with projects from version control, and more. So I can only recommend this tool if you are really concerned about systematic configuration of working environments: create one setup - apply it automatically hundreds of times. And no, I'm not an author of Oomph, just a happy user.
Sharing your workspace setup using Project Sets
Your workspace setup may consist of several projects from one or more repositories. Once you have setup your workspace, you can share it with others by exporting a Team Project Set. A project set is a text file that contains a pointer to each of the projects contained in the project set.When a project set is imported, these pointers are used to fetch the projects from the repository.
http://help.eclipse.org/mars/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.platform.doc.user%2Ftasks%2Ftasks-cvs-project-set.htm
A long time afterwards I got an idea about how to solve this:
Set up a multi-module Maven project.
Configure the settings in the parent pom file.
Import the projects into Eclipse as Maven projects.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually tested this, so I don't know how well it's working...
Eclipse has projects, what's the purpose of the Workspace that appears to group projects? Projects could live in the directory tree isn't that a more natural way of organizing different projects?
When you first start up Eclipse not knowing much about it, it feels like an unnecessary layer of bloat that new users have to get accustomed to first. You're forced to set up some organizing structure that, although specific to Eclipse, wants to live in the rather general-sounding place ~/Workspace.
The workspace is a collection of projects and the metadata that cannot be included in a project because it's not portable (references paths and resources on a specific system) or because it pertains to Eclipse as a whole.
Without the workspace concept, opening a project in Eclipse would be followed by multiple steps of getting things configured. This information would be lost when Eclipse is closed or all projects you ever work on would have to share the same configuration.
Examples of metadata stored in workspace:
Locations of available JDK's and JRE's. The project references a JRE by name, the workspace metadata is needed to resolve that reference.
Locations of application servers.
Path variables.
Open perspectives, layout of views, etc. Consider one application where you need Git and app server vs another application where you need SVN and Android development tools. The views you'd want to keep open and how you'd arrange these views would be very different for two applications.
Should every team member create his or her own workspace and import project stored under source control? Or is there a way to put workspace under source control too?
How to avoid using absolute paths in workspace configuration?
Are there other bottlenecks in this task?
I would not put Workspaces into SCM; that would demand that each developer's environment be identical. Instead take care to avoid any hard-coded paths; use workspace variables.
Use Project Set Files to identify and share sets of projects that need to be imported to a Workspace. These files can/should be kept in SCM, perhaps in dedicated release projects.
My practice when doing serious work on an application is to start with a clean workspace, no extraneous projects. Populate it using the PSF.
One route people take is to generate the Eclipse projects from the build file. This has an added benefit if the development environment is designed to not have a rigid structure (e.g. the path to library X can be relatively different in environment Y than in environment Z) since the same configuration data (files, environment variables, etc) can be used to set up the Eclipse project as the non-Eclipse environment.
I think it is quite normal to have more than one binary in a project. However, with Eclipse CDT I don't know how to set up the IDE to get things done.
I know I can create several projects - one per binary. And I know I can set the dependencies per project. However, I cannot regard them as one project in Eclipse. If I'd like to share the code with a version control system (like svn), each developer has to import the projects separately.
What I miss is something like the Solution (sln file) in Visual Studio. Should I create a single project and create the make files by myself?
I haven't tried it out yet, but there is this 'project set' which can be ex- and imported. Is this the solution? Can this be put into version control?
My goal it to put everything under version control, not only subprojects. I cannot imagine that CDT makes only sense for single-binary applications.
How can I work properly?
I am quite sure CDT doesn't support sub-projects, which leaves you pretty much with:
one workspace per "set of projects"
one project per binary (like you mention in your question)
project dependencies (like you mention in your question)
In term of version control, that means:
submodules (Git),
subrepos (Mercurial) or
external (SVN)
for each project needing a shared library project.
In short, that means putting under version control various components (set of files), with one referencing specific version of others (that list of specific versions of other components is called a "configuration", based on a component-based approach development)