"Marilyn Sander" <marilyn@hal.com> wrote in message
news:<200009130103.SAA23921@capella.ssd.hal.com>...
>
> Well, I am having my first experience with ClearCase Explorer,
> and so far it is not a pleasant one.
>
> First, the thing comes up with a diagram of UCM, and that diagram
> stays even if you choose the "base ClearCase" button. It makes
> me feel that Rational is trying to stuff UCM down our throats,
> even though UCM is a much weaker and less flexible process than
> what many of us have already implemented. This is irritating.
If you are pressing the Base ClearCase "bar", that doesn't change anything
other than the page of the shortcut bar control. The page containing the
diagram changes in response to the type of view you have selected. Selected
means that you have clicked on the shortcut. The view then appears in the
tree and list controls. If you are not finding the content of the info pane
helpful, as I mentioned before, simply toggle "View->Information Pane".
>
> More important, however, is that ClearCase Details have disappeared
> and have been replaced with ClearCase Explorer. ClearCase Details
> were pretty intuitive. I can't tell whether ClearCase Explorer is
> intuitive or not. When, from the Windows Explorer screen, I click
> on an element and choose ClearCase Explorer, I get a message
> that (for example) "x:\cctest_trial1\top does not resolve to
> an existing view shortcut. If it is a valid path within an
> existing ClearCase view, you must first create a shortcut to that
> view."
>
That's true. Please see below.
> Well, I can't for the life of me figure out what they mean by
> creating a shortcut to the view. The view is mapped to a drive;
> what more could they want? It doesn't work when I go thru the
> m: drive, either. In the help topics index, there is no entry
> for shortcut to a view. If I really have to create a shortcut
> to each view, where would the shortcut go? On the desktop?
> In some particular directory?
>
> Also, in the side window under the "views" tab, the only views shown
> are local views. I'm using views on a Solaris view server, and those
> views aren't shown. I *have* imported those views. They show
> up when I do an lsview fromthe command line. Is there a trick
> to this that is escaping me? Can anyone suggest a way to go about
> learning the Windows Explorer other than to get a demo from
> someone who already knows?
>
The ClearCase Explorer is a view-centric browser. ClearCase Details was
file-system-centric. We have tried to provide a tool that can be the center
of activity for the developer, knowing of course that IDEs generally take
precedence for many developers. A ClearCase Explorer shortcut represents a
view within the GUI. The CC Explorer attempts to provide transparent access
to views without having to manually map drives. You mentioned that your
views were not present in the interface, and this is true because they
actually exist elsewhere. The CC Explorer attempts to round up all of the
views that it thinks you "own" and automatically create shortcuts for them.
If view shortcuts are not created, as in your case, you only have to press
the "views" tab of the shortcut bar, right click on that page, and choose
"Create view shortcut". You would normally do this INSTEAD of mapping a
drive or starting a view. It does all of that. If you can create views on
the windows side, using the create view or join project applets from within
the CC Explorer has the added benefit that the view shortcuts are created
for you.
It is true that when you choose to browse a view from the windows explorer
the CC Explorer requires a shortcut. Again, the idea is that you would have
mapped the view by creating a view shortcut first rather than the other way
around. But I am in agreement that CC Explorer can, and probably should
create a shortcut for you at that time.
I'm sorry that the documentation is not more helpful and I will feed that
back to our doc group. We have tried very hard to provide a better tool than
that which we previously offered. It's often very difficult to create one
that is both approachable and understandable to new users and one that is
immediately accepted by expert users as well. Doing so often involves
changes that are confusing. I will take the things you have said and
consider them in future planning. Any other suggestions are always
appreciated.
We really hope that you will find the tool an improvement since it has many
of the things that users have told us were missing from Details. CC Explorer
will list the contents of a folder often 4 times faster, it does ClearCase
operations like rmname and mv, often overloaded with drag&drop, is
customizable (Context menus as before as well as toolbar customizations) and
integrates the functionality of HomeBase into a view-context environment,
remembers the view you had selected each time the tool is started and the
folder that you had open last in each view, etc.
Thanks
Adrien
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 06 2001 - 00:26:33 EDT