[Feature Request] Virtual Folders for Projects

[Yaakuro]

Hi Eranif

I like to know if you ever (or others) considered Virtual Folders for projects? Let's say I have 15 projects in my Workspace. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to put some projects into sub project folders? What do you think how much effort that needs to do so and which files are important to get in touch to start?

Yaakuro

[eranif]

I never considered that, I know that VS supports it.
I assume here that you are talking about a virtual folder for the workspace level (i.e. the virtual folders are children of the workspace and may contain projects)
To start implementing this, you should look at Plugin/workspace.cpp and Plugin/project.cpp

[Yaakuro]

Yes, virtual folder in the workspace level. So would that be interesting to have? It would help to organize projects visually a bit more.
You have any suggestion how to keep the workspace backwards compatible? Let's say if CodeLite 9.3 would support it but if one opens the workspace file with older version of CodeLite?

Yaakuro

[eranif]

So would that be interesting to have?

Yes and it will

You have any suggestion how to keep the workspace backwards compatible?

We can't. If a CodeLite without this feature will attempt to open a workspace with virtual folders - it will ignore them and will load only projects which are a direct children of the workspace

[Jarod42]

As I understand,
instead of creating project in a virtual folder child (in config),
adding a new properties link to the virtual folder would allow old codelite to open it.

so instead of natural:

Code: Select all

<workspace>
  <VirtualFolder>
     <project> </project>
     //...
  </VirtualFolder>
  <project> </project> // Normal project
  // ..
<workspace>

you may do

Code: Select all

<workspace>
  <VirtualFolder></VirtualFolder>
  <project InsideVirtualFolder="virtualForderIdOrName" > </project>
  <project> </project> // Normal project
  // ..
<workspace>

[eranif]

As I understand,
instead of creating project in a virtual folder child (in config),
adding a new properties link to the virtual folder would allow old codelite to open it.

Great idea

[Yaakuro]

How complicated is this? Is it possible to add this feature to next release of CodeLite?

[eranif]

Please post a feature request on GitHub
Not *that* complicated...
but there is definitely some work

[eranif]

I started working on this and it appears to be more complicated as I first thought it would be

instead of creating project in a virtual folder child (in config),
adding a new properties link to the virtual folder would allow old codelite to open it

This approach can not work with the expected user flow:

• User right click on the workspace or on a workspace folder and selects "New Folder"
• Right click on the "Workspace Virtual Folder" brings a context menu with various options such as "Create new project"

The above is what I consider an intuitive flow, it also means that a folder should be able to exists without any projects attached to it.
So there is no way of avoiding it, but this means that an older versions of CodeLite will not be able to open a workspace that contains their projects inside a virtual folder.

A possible solution to allow users with different versions of CodeLite to work is to provide some kind of an export mechanism

[Jarod42]

An other possibility would be to have an extra separated entry to manage the hierarchy...