Reusing a Flash Builder Workspace

I use Flash Builder and Flash Pro together, and over time I have learned to just bow to how Flash Builder wants me to do things. What this means is that each "family" of Flash files has to have its own Workspace, because Flash Builder expects the Flash file to be in a subdirectory of the workspace in a directory that's the named the same thing as the Flash file. If that's not where it is, you either have to remember to tell Flash Builder not to use its default or things go very wrong, very fast.

In a team environment, the process has to be as simple as possible, without a bunch of fiddly steps that people have to remember to do at exactly the right moment, so it's just easier to go with what Flash Builder wants us to do. However, this adds other fiddly steps that people need to do each time they start a new workspace, such as importing snippets and laying out all the panels just so.

So I thought I'd hit on a brilliant plan, which is just to check the workspace settings into version control that live in the .metadata folder. This way, everyone would get a workspace that's already set up when they export the "base" Flash project and they could just start working. And this does work for the intended purpose, but I found that workspace relative paths would break (paths that refer to the ${DOCUMENTS} variable). These would unaccountably point to the original base project directory.

On Windows, for whatever reason a file contents search didn't turn up the offending string. I suspect this has to do with the weird way the .metadata folder starts folder and file names with "." So I was off to Google to try to find out how other people transfer their settings. I found one post that suggested you just copy the .metadata/plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings directory. The result I had from that was that the site relative root now pointed to the project I'd copied the directory from. At least now I had it narrowed down to a large handful of files that I could then open and look at individually.

To save you the bother, I'll tell you that the file that contains the location of the workspace for workspace-relative links in the above directory is called org.eclipse.core.resources.prefs, and that file contains the pathVariable.DOCUMENTS string that tells Flash Builder/Eclipse where the workspace thinks it is. I haven't had a chance to play with it to see if simply not putting that file in version control makes things better or borks them, but even if everyone has to manually update that variable when setting up a project it's much better than having to set up every workspace from scratch when we start a new project.