One very valuable use for projects is in managing development workflow. Using projects, you can develop entirely on your local machine, ensuring that your work-in-progress doesn't affect production users. When you're ready, the project can be deployed-by PrimalScript, and as a single unit-to a production server where the project goes "live."
This contrasts with the common technique of editing files directly in production such as on a Web server. With this technique, changes are seen immediately by users-but so are mistakes. Editing "live" files directly is a very poor development practice and PrimalScript projects mean you don't ever need to. Instead, projects allow you to work on your local machine which serves as a development "sandbox" or testbed. You then deploy completed, tested, debugged files into production.
Workspace Management
Workspaces form the basis for projects; all projects are contained within a workspace and a workspace can contain multiple projects. PrimalScript can only have one workspace open at a time. A workspace helps to organize related projects. For example, you might have one project for a Web site and another for an ActionScript project that is used in the Web site. The workspace allows them to be open at the same time within PrimalScript.
The Workspace area of the Project tab provides functionality for working with workspaces:
•Open
Opens a previously-saved .pws file.
•Save and Save As
Saves the current workspace to a .pws file.
•Close
Closes the current workspace.
Workspaces can also include contacts such as the developer responsible for the workspace. Simply right-click the workspace name in the Workspace Browser to add a contact. You can also:
•Add new projects or insert existing projects into the workspace.
•Add configurations besides the default Debug and Release configurations.
•Open the workspace .pws file as a text file.
•Connect the entire workspace to source control and then add the entire workspace to your source control solution.
•For workspaces under source control, perform check-in and check-out operations for the entire workspace.
Managing Project Items
Projects can consist of multiple files and folders.
The Project tab, or right-clicking on a project in the Workspace Browser, provides options for adding new items, adding existing items (that is, items which already exist but aren't yet part of the project), and adding folders. You can right-click a project item in the Workspace Browser to remove it (without deleting it) from the project, or to permanently delete it.
When adding new items (as opposed to existing items), the dialog box restricts you to those file types which are valid for the type of project you're working on.
See also:
