Load session from XML

[dr_barnowl]

Since BC3 can save sessions to XML, what are the chances of passing it the path to a session file as an argument?

The use case for use with a version control system would be the ability to control the session parameters in detail, particularly alignment of files that had been renamed.

[Aaron]

Is the Tools menu -> Options -> General -> Shared sessions file suitable for your needs? You can declare a session file here that will load a remote session file, that could have specific Version Control sessions that could then be called from the command line.

[dr_barnowl]

That would probably work in a pinch ; I shall give it a go if I have the time.

You could
- Rewrite the session file
- Pass the session name on the command line ...
- You can't do that (as far as I can tell), you'd have to write a script to load it

I think the effort required to implement my idea would be low though.

[dr_barnowl]

Another question along this track :

Alignment overrides

It appears you can only align
* Files by name
* Folders by name
But NOT
* Files by path

The last has relevence when using the "Ignore folder structure" option. The scenario I am thinking of is when you have renamed a file ; possibly into another folder.

Within the folder ; fine, you can make an alignment override for that.
Outside the folder ; you have to use "Ignore folder structure" to get them to align

Alas, you cannot be specific and state which path has been renamed to which path. You can only align filenames OR folders; I'm sure it's common enough that different folders house files of the same name that should not be aligned. For example, every folder in my current project materials has a "default.txvClassDiagram20" file.

Two files with the same name in the same tree will always align in "Ignore Structure" even if they have different paths. The alignment algorithm appears to prefer aligning files at the same directory nesting, and aligning paths that come alphabetically last, first ; even if there is an identically named equivalent (!).

ie.

.\sandwich\brain.txt
compared to
.\sandwich\brain.txt
.\shrub\brain.txt

one\sandwich\brain.txt will align with two\shrub\brain.txt ; even if two\sandwich\brain.txt would seem a better match.

What would be nice is if you could turn off the folder structure, but not ignore it - so you could pull off the trick of specifying an alignment override on a pair of paths (allowing you to compare renamed files), without having misalignments caused by deletion/creation of same-named files elsewhere in the tree.