Working with several projects

Describes how to work with multiple projects.

The IDE allows you to open more than one project at the same time, but only one of the open projects is active at once.

Setting the active project

The active project name is the one that is currently selected in the OPL Projects Navigator. No action is required to change active projects other than clicking the project name or any of the files inside the project folder.

Important:

This does NOT mean that clicking in a project and making it the active project causes its default run configuration to be the active run configuration under the Run button Run button. By default, when you click the green arrow in the Run button, you relaunch the last run configuration solved, in whatever project was last run.

So if you want to launch a run configuration from the project you have just set as the active project by clicking in it, use the Run option from the right-click menu, and select the run configuration you want. After the first time you do this, the run configuration will be set as the most recently run, and simply clicking the green arrow of the Run button will relaunch it.

Multiple references to the same file

There are two ways of reusing model, data, and settings files.

In several projects

You can create several projects that reference the same files. This makes sense, for instance, if your projects are meant to be eventually deployed in different business contexts while addressing similar or related optimization problems.

In several run configurations

If you plan to use CPLEX® Studio to write and test several versions of identical or similar optimization problems, you should consider creating several run configurations of a single project rather than one project for each variation. See Executing a project in Getting Started with the IDE for details. This can be the case, for instance, at prototyping stage, for testing and debugging purposes. Several samples delivered with the CPLEX Studio distribution, such as cutstock, production, sailco, and others, define more than one run configuration.