Wise Tip #1

(as in Wise Installer of course)

I learned something new about relative paths in Wise, thought you might find it useful.

When you're working on an installation package in Wise Installer, it remembers the location of the source files you added, so that you can quickly recompile the package whenever one of the files changes. Usually convenient, but there a couple of cases where this causes problems.

1. You branch the project to a new milestone and now it's in a folder named "Milestone2" instead of "Milestone1" (You are using milestones in your project, right?)
2. You're working with another developer who doesn't have the exact same folder structure as you.

One solution is that everyone working on the project should have identical folder structures. In general, this is a good idea and can eliminate confusion on the development team. Our SourceSafe databases are mostly structured in a Client Name/Project Name format that seems to have worked well for us over the years, and a lot of us have set up our systems to use D:/Projects/Client Name/Project Name.

But sometimes this isn't practical. For instance, some folks don't have a "D:\" partition for project files, so they have to use "C:\Projects" instead.

The solution

Wise has another solution for us: Select Tools menu > Convert Source Paths. This lets you clean up the paths to all of the source files you added.

The trick is that you can define all paths to source files relative to the location of the WSI. So the best option is to put the .WSI in the root folder of your project. That way, all of your project folders are automatically relative, e.g. .\Model, .\Storage, .\System, .\Template, .\Working.

As you branch to new milestones, the .WSI comes with you. You're probably updating the version number or adding new files anyway, so modifications to the .WSI would also be expected in the new milestone folder.

Hope this works for you!