File locking, check-in/check-out

[JohnCVogt]

My AutoCAD users who have or borrow laptops to take work home with them find BC very friendly for copying files to/from the project servers. We have a continuing problem with concurrent editing of the two copies of the files. Can we somehow lock selected files on the server so that users in the office get a "file is currently in use ... would you like to open the file read-only?" If this is already possible in BC, great. If anyone knows of a plug-in for it, or an open-with tool, also great.

Just in case this has piqued an interest in somebody who knows exactly what I'm talking about and is going to write a really simple little plug-in, there's actually a little more to it, and I'd be delighted to add complexity to the task, to make it really interesting, elegant, and useful for AutoCAD users.

[Zoë]

Re: File locking, check-in/check-out

It sounds like you need some sort of version control. Have you looked into something like Visual SourceSafe? That enforces single user write access through checkouts and checkins. We can certainly discuss what would be needed to support this as a plugin, but I think actually enforcing the locking is outside the scope of what we want BC to be.

We aren't recommending any specific version control system right now, but we do have a list of the ones that work with BC here: http://www.scootersoftware.com/support.php?c=kb_vcs