In terms of reporting, there is very little you will need to do with the vast number of options available for projects in Eclipse. Therefore, if we are working with a lot of projects, we may have other projects open other than the one you are working in, which case we may want to do a mass closing of projects. Eclipse offers a nice option to close all projects unrelated to the selected one.
In this screenshot, we can see I have three projects opened—Class_Cars_BIRT_Reports, MyRCPTest, and MyTestGWT. Because I am only working with the Class_Cars_BIRT_Reports project, it is the only project I want open. Therefore, I select it, right-click on it in the Navigator, and select Close Unrelated Projects. This will close all but the selected project.
We can also specify that a project is related. Try the following to illustrate.
As this example illustrates, once we specify a project is related, it will not close when the Close Unrelated Projects option is specified for any project in a relation chain.
If we need to focus a little more on a specific project and closing projects isn't an attractive option, we have the option to Go Into a project or folder and only that project's files will be visible in the Navigator. In the preceding screenshot, I can right-click on Class_Cars_BIRT_Reports and select Go Into instead of Close Unrelated Projects. This will force the Navigator to display only the files and subfolders that are under the Classic_Cars_BIRT_Reports project.
If we look at this screenshot, we can see the Class_Cars_BIRT_Reports project when the Go Into option has been executed on it. Notice the yellow left arrow is available, whereas the right one is not. The left arrow is the equivalent of a "Go Back" button. The right arrow is the same as the Go Into menu option. We also have the folder icon with an up arrow, which gets you directly to the top level workspace.
Let's look at this in an example.
- Select the
Classic_Cars_BIRT_Reportsproject. - Right-click and select Go Into.
- Click on the yellow left arrow.
- Now the right arrow will be available, which allows us to go forward. Click on the yellow-colored right pointing arrow.
- Now, click the Up to Workspace button.
This should demonstrate that these buttons function just like a browser's history buttons, but work with the navigation of the file system within the workspace.
The final option we will look at here is the Team option. This is useful when we have a versioning server and we want to submit our files or check out files from it. Eclipse, out of the box, supports only CVS; however, there are plugins available for subversion and other versioning systems as well.
So, let's say we have a CVS server at IP address 192.168.1.103. We want to be able to store out reports in this repository. Let's look at the steps on how to do so.
- From the Navigator, right-click on the project, and select Team | Share Project.
- From the repository type screen, select CVS.
- Input the necessary information to connect to the repository.
- Specify a module name or choose to use the Eclipse project name as the repository project name.
- Click Finish.
- We will then be asked to enter a comment for the commit of new files.
Now, our files have been stored in the repository. In the Navigator, a version number and type will appear next to each file. When we edit a file, it will affect only the local copy, and an indicator will appear next to the file indicating that a change has been made. In the following screenshot, the Hello-World.rptDesign file has been edited:
With a project shared, the Team menu will change and have additional options. We can synchronize with the repository, which will do a comparison between files to show which files are different in the repository and which ones have been edited locally. We can commit files to the repository and we can update our local files from the repository. We can also disconnect from the repository, which will bring us back to the state where we can edit only our local files and they will not be shared.
It is recommended to use the Synchronize…option if we use a repository. From the Synchronize… menu, we can see the differences between the local copy of files and the remote versions, see the revision history, and we have more control over the commit and update selections.
