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Plastic look and feel

Tonight, I took some time to take a look at the jgoodies look and feel. I'll probably go ahead and include it in the upcoming late October release since it improves the polish of the Enterprise client and is very easy to install into the code.

How to apply a label to a set of files.

When you are working in product development, you often need to apply a label to the files that compose that product. Sounds simple... you just select the files, and apply the label.

But what if there are some files present in the project -- files that you have under version control -- that are not really meant to be part of the product's set of files? How do you set things up so that you don't have to always keep track of what belongs in the project vs. what does not belong... i.e. how do you keep track of what should get labeled vs. what should not get labeled?

Some of the specifics are different between QVCS/QVCS-Pro and QVCS-Enterprise, but for all three products, the best first step to take is to apply a floating label to those files that are meant to be part of the product release.

Applying a floating label is a straight forward task -- just select the file (or files), click the label button on the toolbar, enter a label string, and make sure to enable the 'Make this a floating label' check box. With QVCS and QVCS-Pro, you can also apply a floating label to all the files that are within a project by selecting the project node, and then using the context menu to apply the label. (QVCS-Enterprise does not yet support project or directory level operations).

Once you have a floating label in place for just those files where it is required, it's a simple operation to apply a regular (non-floating) label to just those files: Select the files (or project if you're using QVCS or QVCS-Pro), apply the label -- making sure to enable the 'Duplicate this label' check box, and in the associated combo box, select the floating label that you had earlier applied.

When the labeling operation completes, only those files that already had the floating label will get the new label. Files that didn't have the floating label will be skipped.

Now you can easily create your release build by doing a 'get by label' using the newly applied label that will only be associated with the files are actually part of the product.