Possible to customize files in local workspace view?

[ben]

I am coming to PlasticSCM from Perforce, so I'm sorry if this is something that doesn't work in PlasticSCM.

I would love to be able to customize which files are in my local view onto the workspace. For example our workspace contains some files that are only used by programmers, and others that are only used by artists. It would help us a lot if artists could make their local workspaces only refer to a subset of the server workspace, and vice-versa for programmers.

e.g.

/Project/
/Project/General/ <= Artists & programmers can see this
/Project/OnlyForProgrammers/ <= Artists can make their workspace not download this and not care about merges etc.
/Project/OnlyForArtists/ <= Programmers can make their workspace not download this and not care about merges etc.

Is this possible? How would we do it?

[ollieblanks]

Yes this is possible!

If your Artists use the Gluon GUI, which was designed with artists in mind, they can configure their workspace to only include the files that they need. Read more about it here.

Hope this helps!

[ben]

Thanks @ollieblanks!

In our case the programmers would like to avoid having to "get latest" every time the DLLs are updated.

I tried changing the workspace set-up in Gluon to ignore all DLLs, and it seemed to work, but when I swapped back to the full Plastic SCM GUI it required me to update to "Full mode", and it downloaded all the DLLs. So this doesn't really solve our problem unfortunately. It would be great if the full GUI supported partial workspaces.

I tried the new new GUI and it seems to have the same issues.

[ben]

To follow up on this, a coworker showed me the "Add to cloaked list" and "Add to hidden changes list" features in the GUI, and the matching "cloaked.conf" and "hidden_changes.conf" files.

I tried adding the files via the GUI and confirming that they were in the .conf files but it still says "1 new changeset available" and lists files that should be ignored

[ollieblanks]

Hey Ben,

Gluon is designed for artists who do not need the entire project to work. Whereas the full client is designed with developers in mind, who do require the full project. I understand that this does pose a different problem where you are forced to download everything even if you dont want to.

Cloaked.conf is what you would want for this. Please see the below snippet from here.

Quote

Cloaked items are items that the update operation won't download by default from the repository to the workspace. This is convenient in some scenarios, for instance when there are big files in the repository that are updated often, but you don't really work with them, so you prefer to skip downloading those cloaked files every time you switch the workspace to a different branch or do an update of the workspace.

Hope this helps!

[ben]

@ollieblanks are cloaked files supposed to work with the full client? It seems that I can add them for the full client, but even after adding them, I still get the "1 new changelist available" and have to download the cloaked files before I can commit.

[calbzam]

Hi Ben,

The main problem here is the cloaked rules are not compatible with merges. The Incoming Changes view is internally running a merge to calculate the pending files to be downloaded and if you update via the Incoming Changes view, the cloak rules won't be applied.

On the contrary, if you update via the "Update Workspace" button in the Explorer Workspace, you will see that the cloaked rules are actually applied.

I know this behavior is not very user friendly and we are internally discussing the best approach to improve it.

You could potentially disable the Incoming Changes view to avoid this limitation with cloaked files, but you will lose the advantages of using this view:

https://blog.plasticscm.com/2019/10/incoming-changes.html

Regards,

Carlos.