Folder Alignment

[davenovak]

Can you please give me an example of how Folder Alignments work? I can’t seem to find any in the help for doing this.

In my case, I have output from a build machine that uses the following folders:
\\build\Beta\Release8.2.0\Server\bin
\\build\Beta\Release8.2.0\Server\admin
\\build\Beta\Release8.2.0\Web
These must map up to the following folders on the QA machine to which they get deployed on:
C:\BetaInstall\Servers\QA01
C:\BetaInstall\Admin\QA01
C:\BetaInstall\Web\QA01
Is there any way to align these folders in such a matter within a single Beyond Compare session?

Thanks in advance,

--Dave

[Craig]

Hi Dave,

Folder alignments currently only support forcing alignments of items that have been renamed, not moved, so it won't be able to align those folders in a single session.

[davenovak]

Is there any plan to add such support to a later release of BC 3.x?

[Craig]

I've looked into supporting multiple base folders on each side, but I can't say if/when such a feature will actually make it in. We aren't planning on expanding the folder aligment support to handle moves; it would complicate things quite a bit.

[davenovak]

So going back to what you said earlier, am I to understand then that the Align With... action is only then for mapping file extensions within a Folder Compare to different extensions? The UI sort of confused me in that regard since Align With... allowed me to select a folder. Also, help for the Alignment Override dialog seems to indicate that the left and right side can be a file or folder.

So what does the folder alignment do in this feature? Anything? Or is only file alignment supported?

Thanks for your help with this,

--Dave

[Craig]

Sorry for the confusion. "Align With" can align files or folders, and it can be any sort of rename, not just changing extensions, but their parent folders have to be lined up. Basically, if you can say "AAA" => "BBB" without either side needing a \ then it will work.

In your example you would have \\build\Beta\Release8.2.0 on one side and C:\BetaInstall on the other, so your folder structures would look like this:

////////////////// + Admin
////////////////// - QA01
+ Server ////////////////////
- bin ////////////////////
- admin ////////////////////
////////////////// + Servers
////////////////// - QA01
+ Web + Web
////////////////// - QA01

You could use these two "Align with" rules:

Server=>Servers
bin=>QA01

And Server\bin will line up with Servers\QA01. If you do that though, you can't line up Server\admin with Admin\QA01 because Server is already lined up with Servers and can't also be lined up with Admin, and you can't line up Web with Web\QA01 because they're at different levels in the tree.

[davenovak]

OK -- that all makes perfect sense now. Thanks for the explanation.

If you guys ever do get to supporting multiple base folders in a future release, I for one would use such a feature. In the meantime, I'm getting by with using multiple saved sessions, which do the mapping at the base folder level. I could also script a solution, though currently I prefer to look at the folders interactively.

Thanks again for your help on this.

--Dave