What is the best way to put a Flex3 project under source control (subversion)

Question

Setting up Flex project for group development can be a bit tricky. There are lots of little local settings that might need to be tweaked in order to have a project that can be easily checked out.

I've had limited success using the built-in import/export flex project utilities. I seem to wind up editing by hand a lot and I think I might be missing something.

UPDATE I neglected to mention originally that my goal is to make it possible to checkout a project from subversion and get up and running with as little fuss as possible. The biggest problems that I have run into all revolve around managing the "dot" files and how to make them flexible enough to deal with different developer environments.

For example, even with just me, I would like to have this ability: at work, I use a Vista machine and at home I use a Mac. There are certainly differences in the way certain paths are described, but they really are quite similar. On Vista, the flex root is c:/ColdFusion8/wwwroot, on OS X, it is /Applications/ColdFusion8. I have been able to set up a linked resource path variable for both CF_FLEX_SERVER and WEBSERVER that I then reference using the ${WEBSERVER}/myProject syntax.

So far, it seems to work pretty well, but I find there are a few places that it still has issues. Specifically, in the .project file you find something like:

<linkedResources>
 <link>
  <name>bin-debug</name>
  <type>2</type>
  <location>c:/inetpub/wwwroot/myProject-debug</location>
 </link>
</linkedResources>

Unfortunately, if I try to change the location entity to ${WEBSERVER}/wwwroot/myProject-debug, flex throws a compiler error. That's a shame, because pretty much everything else works.

Answer 1

Since Flex Builder is written on top of Eclipse, it can integrate with Subclipse. This allows you to pretty easily tag files as 'SVN ignore' to avoid project-specific settings. I've used this to add my Flex projects to an existing SVN repository, which I've checked out to multiple sites. I have noticed a few issues here and there (some checkins get errors, but they're relatively rare), but it generally works.

Answer 2

I have worked through this problem before and generally set my projects up as such:

Application/trunk/source/ <-- workspace is here (can also be in 'trunk') Application/trunk/source/Application <-- Application here

I DO keep my project (.actionScriptProperties, .flexProperties, .project, .settings) in SVN, but NOT my workspace (.metadata) because it's too big.

I find that importing projects via Import -> Flex Project enforces alot of restrictions. For example, if your workspace was in the 'trunk' directory above then importing as a Flex Project will cause the project to be copies into trunk/Application or simply complain about the location.

The better way to go about it is to create the workspace and then Import -> [General] Existing Projects into Workspace. The only difference is that you will have to manually add the Flex Development perspective.

Edit: I'd also recommend setting your compiler options to "Use default SDK" and then setting the appropriate SDK as default. This will prevent commit-tennis when each developer names his SDK differently.