Workspaces

Concept of a Workspace

Under the main application File menu there are operations for managing workspaces:

A workspace is simply a set of git repositories. They are listed in the "Repos" tab in a main window's left pane. You can have several different sets of repositories, each one stored in a different workspace file.

Having an option to group sets of git repositories is useful when you have unrelated sets which you may want to keep separate.

A workspace file contains only basic description for each of the git repositories on its list:

• • Root folder

  • User name and email

  • Set of remote repositories (so it is able to fetch it; see below)

  • Current list of commit bundles (changelists) and branches

Loading a Workspace

A GitForce workspace file has the extension ".giw". You can load it by using a File menu or you can simply drag it (as a file) and drop it onto the application main window.

Upon load, if any of the repos described in a workspace file cannot be found where expected, a dialog will open to let you correct the specification.

Example 1: You have moved some of your repos to another place on your local drive.

If this was your list of repos before you moved them:

Now, after starting GitForce, since it cannot find all repos on their expected paths, it opens a "Recreate Missing Repos" dialog to let you manually adjust the missing ones.

The Status field shows one of the following:

• • Non-existing: Selected path does not exist

  • Empty: Selected path exists and it is empty

  • Non-empty: Selected path exists but it is not empty (usually, not suitable to clone a repo there)

  • OK: This is a desired state for all listed repo paths

At any moment you can press F5 to refresh the status.

We can locate the first two repos by resetting their "Common root path" to a new path in one operation. Select those two and use the Browse button to locate a common root path to where the repos were moved to. (In this example the new location was "s:\projects".)

After that done, you will see the repo roots adjusted to the correct new location and the status field changed to OK, which means repos were found.

The "Common root path" option is very useful when you need to re-target a number of repos at the same time.

If you want to adjust a single repo to a new location simply use the Locate button.

If you do not want a particular repo on your final list, Delete it; this will only remove it from a workspace file, no actual repo is being deleted.

Example 2: You are loading (rather, recreating) a set of repos saved on another PC.

Since a workspace file does not contain actual git folders and files, all the repos are presumably stored on a remote git server (for example, the github). A list of locally missing repos will show "Non-existing" status. However, in this case we will use a Create button to pull repos from a remote server.

One repo at a time, follow the "New Repository" wizard to select a repo target folder and to download it. The remote will be filled in for you since a workspace contains a copy of each repo's list of remotes.