Store working folder data inside working folders:a solution?

[frans]

Hello,

We are experiencing the strange problem that two users are looking at the same file through their Vault clients and one user sees that the local file is too old and needs merging while the other user sees the remote and local versions being the same. This file is stored on a network drive, both users use the same mapping in their working folder path.

This problem is probably caused by the Vault metadata ( _sgvault) being stored on the users’ workstations. So this problem might be solved if we where to check the option "Store working folder data inside working folders” in the Vault client’s general settings. As this will have to be changed for all users, and because, according to the manual, working folder data and status will be lost, I want to be sure this is a step in the right direction. Some of the things I’m wondering about are:

- Can this option be set on the side of the Vault server? It may not be easy to force all clients to use the same settings and keep them that way.
- Can we expect any problems when making this change?
- I seems this setting is a global one, it can not be set for individual folders. Wouldn’t this be a nice idea?

Regards,

Frans

[dan]

Yes, this will work better if you store the state inside the working folder, although I'm not sure I'd recommend having two users use the same working folder. I can't think of a specific problem that would happen (other than the one you are seeing), but it wasn't designed for this case, so some other issue may pop up down the road.

- Can this option be set on the side of the Vault server? It may not be easy to force all clients to use the same settings and keep them that way.

This currently has to be set on each client - there isn't a server option to force it.

- Can we expect any problems when making this change?

See concerns above - can't think of any specific ones, but it is possible.

- I seems this setting is a global one, it can not be set for individual folders. Wouldn’t this be a nice idea?

The effort to keep track of this would be great, and it would make the code a lot more complex. What advantage would there be to be able to set this for individual folders?

Hope this helps,

[frans]

Thanks for the quick reply!

The effort to keep track of this would be great, and it would make the code a lot more complex. What advantage would there be to be able to set this for individual folders?

I don't know, but if there are advantages to storing these data elsewhere (in the local 'application data' folder, which is the default setting), those advantages will not be lost if the metadata only need to be stored in the working folder for a few projects or subfolders of projects. I mean, if one setting would be good for some projects and the other setting for other projects, then it would be nice if that setting was not a global one.

But I'm thinking now... wouldn't using shadow folders be a better solution in our case? These you can set per folder. We have not used them yet, but wouldn't we achieve the same thing if we use shadow folders? Are metadata also stored in the shadowfolder or is it still possible for different users working on the same files to have inconsistent version information if those files are copied to the shadow folder? The fact that files are also stored locally when using shadowfolders does not seem a problem to me. It's only that we want to be able to have multiple users working on some sets of remote files..

[dan]

Shadow folders are not what you want - they are intended to be read-only copies of what is in the repository. They are not intended to be edited.

[mlippert]

frans,
I don't think I understand what you are trying to accomplish. Why in the world would you want multiple people working on the exact same files at the same time?

Mike

[Guest]

frans,
I don't think I understand what you are trying to accomplish. Why in the world would you want multiple people working on the exact same files at the same time?

Mike

A good question, I was already wondering if I was going about this in the right way. Well, one case in which you might want a setup like that is when you have a website under source control and you want all edits immediately published on the web site. Another case is when you are working on a project which has a group of files on a file server. Some of these files may be in the version control system, for others there is no need to use version control. But you do want the whole group of files to always represent the current (latest) state of the project.
I probably should add that we don’t allow multiple checkouts, so from that angle having multiple people working on the same files should not be a problem.

Regards,

Frans