How to Find a Web Project?

[Easy Rider]

The Web Projects Control Panel seems NOT to be available, when I first open Alpha5. It appears in the tool bar only after I open the Web Projects Made Easy menu. How can I get to it directly?

I want to locate my new Web project in a different Drive:\Folder than the one that gets opened automatically, but there seems to be no way to navigate to the new location. How do I do this?

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: How to Find a Web Project?

Are you new to web applications?

This is a common request from my clients who are new to web applications, and I've had some of them stew about it for days!

I understand that you want what you want, but you are going to have plenty to worry about as you get into the web, so why fight the "small stuff"?

Yes, opening the web application is one more click, but I've never found a way around it. I think we're stuck with it until Alpha adds a setting. You might add this request to the "wish list" section of the board.

You need to think about your project having four locations.

The first is the development area. Alpha wants to put this as a subdirectory of the directory that contains the database. For example, if you create the database c:\mydb\mydb.adb, then alpha wants the development pages in c:\mydb\mydb.WebProjects\Default.WebProject\.

If you create a new project named myproject, then it defaults to
c:\mydb\mydb.WebProjects\myproject.WebProject\

The second location is the Local webroot. This is where the pages will be published on your local machine while you are in development so you can see what they look like and do your testing. If you click on Profiles on the top menu, then Local Webroot, you'll see that this defaults to
c:\a5Webroot\ This is where localhost will look for the pages.

There is a place in the property sheet where you can add a target folder, so I usually create a mydb folder. Pages then get published to
c:\a5Webroot\mydb\ and this is where I address the LocalHost
http://localhost/mybd/index.a5w

The third location is the place were pages will be published when you click on Live Preview. These are published to a directory inside the webroot named LivePreview. There doesn't seem to be an option to change this.
c:\a5Webroot\LivePreview\

The fourth location is the working copy publish location on the server. This is where you will publish the pages for the users to access. This location is completely up to you. It is created by clicking on Profiles and creating a new profile.

In addition to these four, I usually also create a directory to hold backups. In this case, it will be c:\A5backup\mydb\

I have customers who start out changing the default locations, but after they fight with it for a few weeks, the all seem to go back to the defaults.

Pat