SlickEdit Automated Project File Adding

This macro will automatically update the current project's file list by scanning directories and files that are specified in a developer controlled.ini file. This frees a developer from manually adding/removing files that they added themselves or that other developers (who may not use SE) added. Simply run this macro to have this done automatically.

The specific directories and files to scan are based on dir list definitions in either a "<project_name>.ini" file in the same directory as your project ("<project_name>.vpj") file or an "ssync.ini" file in your SlickEdit config directory. Edit the "<project_name>.ini" or ssync.ini file to describe your projects. If both files exist, then "<project_name>.ini" will be used.

This macro still has a big advantage over SlickEdit's native support of wildcard adding of files to a project. With SE's wildcard adding, every time you open your project it needs to perform a scan to find all the files. But with this macro this scan can be done on demand by running the 'ssync' macro. When running 'ssync', it saves the list of files to the .vpj file so that this list can be reused when you close the project and open it again later. SE's wild card adding only saves the wild card patterns to the .vpj file, so every time you open your project, it has to rescan. This rescanning can take a long time if you have 10000s of files in a networked drive. The 'ssync' macro only performs this scanning when the user runs 'ssync', and the scanning is now optimized in this latest version of 'ssync' to make the scan much faster.

Long term, SlickEdit needs improved native support for efficiently automatically updating the list of files in a project.

This macro comes from the following discussions on the SlickEdit forum: https://community.slickedit.com/index.php/topic,3262.30.html https://community.slickedit.com/index.php/topic,4697.0.html

Usage

• Use "ssync" to sync the current project.
• Use "ssync -a" to sync all projects in the current workspace.
• Use "ssync -v#" to set debug output level to #.

History

• 2017-12-17: Modified by Rob Bresalier to make the file scanning much faster by having 1 call to insert_file_list per base directory for all filespecs and all exclusions.
• 2013-12-03: Modified by Rob Bresalier to use the "<project_name>.ini" file
• 2008-2013: Original macro written by mikesart and chrisant

Format of the SSYNC.INI file:

<wildcard_group>=*.a;*.b;*.c
<wildcard_group>=*.d;*.e;*.f           (Added to <wildcard_group>)
<another_group>=*.c;<wildcard_group>   (Include one group in another)
<wildcard_group>=                      (Clears <wildcard_group> without
                                        affecting <another_group>)
[ProjectName]
workspace=WorkspaceName                (OPTIONAL LINE)
dir=baseDirectory1, wildcards
dir=baseDirectory2, wildcards
dir=baseDirectory3, wildcards
...etc
exclude=antpattern1
exclude=antpattern2
...etc

wildcard groups

Angle brackets are used to denote aliases that expand to a group of wildcards. Aliases definitions are evaluated in the order they are encountered. Appending to an alias or clearing an alias affects subsequent expansions, but does not affect preceding references to the alias. Some predefined aliases exist: <sources> matches a broad set of common source file extensions, <headers> matches a broad set of common header file extensions, and <slick> matches some common Slick-C extensions. Any wildcard group that appears after the first [ProjectName] are ignored, so make sure to put all of them before the first [ProjectName].

workspace line

The "workspace=" line is optional, and can be used to disambiguate between two projects with the same name that are in different workspaces.

dir line

A "dir=" line specifies a base directory to scan. Prefix the base directory with a plus sign ("+") to scan recursively.

A directory can be relative (in which case it is relative to the project directory) or it can be absolute. It can refer to environment variables. It must be surrounded in double quote marks if it contains commas (when in doubt, surround the directory name in double quote marks).

The "wildcards" on a "dir=" line are optional and can be used to filter the matching files (by default all files match). Separate multiple wildcards with semicolons (for example "*.c;*.cpp;*.h"). The wildcards follow "ant pattern" syntax which is documented here: https://ant.apache.org/manual/dirtasks.html

Also certain special keywords in angled brackets are recognized as synonyms for groups of wildcards. See translate_wildcard_list() in sync_project_with_scm.e for the list of supported keywords (or to add/modify the keywords).

exclude line

An "exclude=" line can specify an ant pattern to exclude within each directory scan. Examples:

Example 1: Exclude all directories named .git, such as basedir/.git, basedir/subdir1/.git, etc:

exclude=**/.git/

When specifying a directory to exclude such as the .git above, make sure it ends with a trailing slash in order to exclude all files beneath that directory. If only specified **/.git without the trailing slash, then it would only exclude files named .git but not the contents of directories named .git. Also make sure to specify the initial **/ to indicate any directory pattern above .git to match the exclude pattern.

Example 2: Exclude all object files with .o extension:

exclude=**/*.o

For any extension (such as .o files) that you want to exclude, make sure to use the **/*.ext syntax. If you only used *.ext, then only the *.ext files in the base directory would get excluded, but *.ext files in subdirectories would still be included. By using **/, you are telling it to also match any directory pattern above the .ext.

[ALWAYS] project

There can also be a specialpseudo-project "[ALWAYS]" which is effectively prepended at runtime to the beginning of each other project in the .ini file. This exists because mikesart wanted his SE macros and build files to be in all of his projects.

Optimizing for faster scans

Each dir= line will invoke 1 call to "insert_file_list()" to scan the specified directories/files in a base directory. To improve the speed of the scanning, you will want to make sure that any directory is only scanned once and not multiple times.

Here is an example that can be optimized where 2 directories with some overlap are to be scanned:

[projectname]
dir=+../basedir, *.c; *.h
dir=+../basedir/specialdir, *

In the above example, "basedir/specialdir" will end up getting scanned 2 times due to a distinct scan for each dir line.

If you wanted to optimize this to have "basedir/specialdir" only scanned 1 time and achieve the same result as having the 2 dir= lines, you can use only 1 dir= line by doing this instead:

[projectname]
dir=../basedir, **/*.c; **/*.h; specialdir/**

Notice in the above that we removed the "+" (for recursion) before "../basedir". The reason for doing this is because we only want to scan all files under 'basedir/specialdir' and we don't want to scan for all files in other directories named 'specialdir' that are not directly under basedir (such as ../basedir/dir1/specialdir).

We still want to recurse all subdirectories for *.c and *.h files, but since we removed the "+", we need to specify recursion for only these 2 file types. This is done by changing the wildcard patterns to be prefixed with **, such as **/*.c and **/*.h. Using the ** will cause recursion to occur for these wildcard patterns only, even though the "+" was removed. This trick came out of the following discussion on the SE forum: https://community.slickedit.com/index.php/topic,15501.msg59475.html#msg59475