Tutorial: QWin Basics

Looking at the New Project Files

Now that you've created a project and have some archive files to work with, let's look around to see what information QWin shows you about your project.

First, you'll notice that all the files in the QVCS distribution that you installed now appear in the file list pane on the right side of the screen. You can click on any of the column headers to sort the files in this pane by the particular column criteria. The "File name" column also serves to sort by extension; just click on the column several times to cycle through ascending and decending sorts of file name or file extension. If the "File name" column is not the selected column, QWin will use the file name as the secondary sort key.

Clicking the "Workfile status" column header, you'll notice that all files with a .txt extension move to the top, as these are the files for which you created QVCS archives. These files will have a file status of "Current," while all other files show as being "Not controlled." Unless filtered out, uncontrolled files will appear in the file list pane along with those files under version control.

Click on tips.txt in the file list pane. In the pane below, you'll see revision information about tips.txt appear on the "Revision Information" tab. The Revision Information tab shows revision information for the selected file(s), or for all the files in a project when you've selected a project node.

If you click on the "File Information" tab, you'll see the header information for tips.txt. Notice that the QVCS attributes shown here are the same as those you selected when you defined the "Text Files" attribute group earlier in the tutorial.

The "Activity Log" tab will show an account of the actions which have taken place while you've been running the program. The "Revision Detail" tab shows the same information as the "Revision Information" tab, except that it is formatted like a .txt file and can be selected.

Retrieving Your First Revision from a QVCS Archive

In this step, you'll get a copy of tips.txt from the QVCS archive that you just created. Before you do that, let's look at tips.txt.

• Start up Windows Explorer and navigate to locate the tips.txt file that came with QVCS. If you chose the default installation location, it will be located in the C:\Program Files\QVCSBin directory.
• If you look at the read/write properties of tips.txt, you'll notice that it is marked as read-only.
• Look in the C:\qvcs_archives\Test Project directory. There, you will find the QVCS archive for tips.txt (tips.uyu). Notice that it is also read-only. You'll also find the QVCS journal file (qvcs.jou), the QVCS cache file (Q$QCache), and the archive files for the other .txt files.
• Delete or rename the tips.txt work file, not the archive. The goal of this step is to remove the tips.txt work file so that when you retrieve it from the QVCS archive in the next step, it will be apparent that QWin did something. If the file were already there, you wouldn't be able to tell that QWin had done anything at all.
• After deleting tips.txt, go back to QWin, and press F5 to refresh the file list pane. Notice that the "Workfile status" for tips.txt is now changes from "Current" to "Missing." This indicates that the archive file for tips.txt exists, but the work file for tips.txt is missing.
• Select tips.txt in the file list pane and click the Get File toolbar button. You could also right click on the file to bring up the context menu, or type CTRL-G.
• The "Get a file" dialog will appear. Click on the OK button to go ahead with the get operation.

  

• In the file list pane, you'll see that the file status for tips.txt is now "Current," indicating that your work file copy is in sync with the latest revision in the associated archive. Using Explorer, you can confirm that QWin retrieved a copy of tips.txt, and that it is read-only.

If you wanted to retrieve multiple files at once, you would simply select all of the desired files, using the CTRL key to add to the selection, and then click the Get toolbar button. You can also perform a get while a project node is selected to retrieve all the files in the selected directory. Clicking on the "Advanced" button will provide you with options to better filter and tailor your get.

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