Imagix 4D User Guide |
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ComboProjects
The Open Combination of Projects dialog (MENU File > Open Project... > Combine>>) enables you to join individual projects together into comboprojects, without duplicating the data being stored in the individual projects. Once you have created separate projects covering subsystems of your software, you can quickly combine them into projects that cover larger portions of your software.
In the dialog, you first specify the set of projects to combine. You can then chose to simply open it. Imagix 4D will combine the set of projects into a single temporary project, and open that. The result will be as if you had created and opened a single project that spanned all of the selected projects.
As an alternative, if the combination of projects is one that you might want to analyze again in the future, you can chose to save it rather than open it. The result is that a permanent new project is created, again spanning all of the selected projects. Although the new comboproject avoids duplicating the data held in the individual projects, it behaves just like a normal individual project. For example, the comboproject is available through the regular Open Project dialog (MENU File > Open Project), just like a normal project.
You may find comboprojects to be a very useful tool for managing the scope of your projects. Because data is not duplicated when creating comboprojects, the comboprojects are created very quickly, and take up essentially no disk space. The comboprojects point to the data which is generated for each of the underlying individual projects, so updating the project data in the individual projects will keep the comboprojects current, and vice-versa. You can create comboprojects of comboprojects.
The aggregation of projects into comboprojects occurs at a higher than the use of multiple data sources within a given project. Through the Data Sources dialog (MENU Project > Data Sources), you're able to specify multiple separate portions of your software for inclusion in a given individual project. Imagix 4D then needs to analyze all of the specified software, and that project remains indivisible. In contrast, when comboprojects are defined, no new data is collected; the data from the existing individual projects is simply combined.