Alienbrain Integration

[David Walters]

I couldn't see anything about this with a search, but I've just tried integrating BC3 build 8507 with an Alienbrain project on my work PC and BC3 silently crashes.

To reproduce this crash I used the source control dialog, '...' button - pointed it at Z:\%projectname% (I also tried C:\alienbrainWork\%projectname%).

Clicking 'ADD' was initially positive. Alienbrain's splash window appeared and then it's 'browse for object' window appeared with its tree view of projects.

From this list I selected %projectname% and clicked okay which brought up the AB login dialog as expected. I click okay, get an AB progress bar as it connects to the project then when that has completed and the window closes, so does BCompare.exe.

I'm using Alienbrain 8.1.0.7300 (for programmers) on XP SP2

Hope you can down the problem, or if there's some more detailed information I can provide (I couldn't find any obvious crash dump file) please let me know.

[Craig]

Hi David,

It's going to take us a bit to download and setup AlienBrain. We'll post a followup when we have more information.

I do have to say I never expected to see a post from an AlienBrain user though. It comes with a license to Araxis Merge Pro, doesn't it? I guess that means we're doing something right with v3. :)

[David Walters]

It's going to take us a bit to download and setup AlienBrain. We'll post a followup when we have more information.
Okay, great!

I do have to say I never expected to see a post from an AlienBrain user though. It comes with a license to Araxis Merge Pro, doesn't it? I guess that means we're doing something right with v3. :)
hehe, I definitely prefer BC to Araxis Merge. There's so much more to play with in BC (even in v2) and when I'm forced to use Araxis I especially miss the 'text details' box and the fluid read-only line select mode. Keep up the great work!

[Craig]

This will be fixed in the next release (3.0.5)

[David Walters]

Great news, can't wait!

[David Walters]

Sorry for the delay in posting this, but I've finally had a bit of time to try out AB integration. Unfortunately there is still a problem with it (in v3.0.8), which I hope you can look at?

The problem is that comparisons only work if you manually "initialise" source control prior to a comparison. If you follow this route exactly through the app:

1. Load 'Beyond Compare 3'
2. [Tools] > Source Control Integration ...
3. Use 'Add' to add a project - Alienbrain splash screen appears and it fires up. You pick a project from the AB workspace which represents the folder on disk.
4. Open a new text comparison (for example)
5. Compare two files from the source controlled directory tree
6. Making a change to either file will result in the "do you want to check out" dialog box, and it all works great :cool:

However once you quit BC3, the source control functionality stops working, either if you:

a. Use the shell integration
b. Load BC3 and go straight for another text comparison

Nothing special happens and the files are just treated as plain old read-only files.

You can, however, re-activate source integration by the following method.

1. Load 'Beyond Compare 3'
2. [Tools] > Source Control Integration ...
3. Double-Click the entry in the source code table *
* The right hand column is *always* empty here, not sure if this noteworthy?
4. Alienbrain fires up, and asks you to pick the project from it's workspace view popup again.
5. Source control integration works again :)


However, if you take the following similar route:

1. Load 'Beyond Compare 3'
2. Go straight to text compare for two source controlled files first.
3. Then, [Tools] > Source Control Integration ...
4. Double click the project entry

You get an error message box "Unable to configure association: Non-specific error". There's no crash or anything, but this error box appears every time you double-click this entry (even if you go back to the home mode) until you quit BC3 and rerun it.


So, hopefully that's enough information -- and I hope you can fix this, it's nearly there and seems like it'll work really well. (FWIW, I blame AB's SCC implementation for these problems ;) )

[David Walters]

I think it's only me who wants to use these two programs together :p

[Craig]

That's probably true. ;) Your post prompted me to re-read your last message though, and it's an issue that we're already working around for a couple of other version control systems, so doing the same workaround for AlienBrain was easy. It should work correctly in the next release.

[David Walters]

Brilliant, thanks :) At least you've got a "back of the box" feature from doing this!

[David Walters]

Just had a chance to try this and it works great - all of the use cases in my original post work. Thanks! :cool: