I've just installed FB in a new VM and I'm trying to get a clean build of out main project. To save clutter, I've only selected the packages that we actually use rather than all of them.
Unfortunately I missed one, so I've been making changes to a project that I can't save. When I try, FB says "saving will remove some actions" and suggests loading the required packages so that I can save the actions. Running the config wizard and selecting the missing package gives the message "please restart so your changes take effect".
This is catch-22: to save I must restart, but before restarting I need to save.
Would it be possible to have a warning before I edit a project that I won't be able to save? Ideally, of course, the warning would be "you can't save this project without removing some actions, remove them now?" with a "no" answer leaving the project non-editable.
Unfortunately, there’s no way around this. A warning would have appeared on the messages tab when you first opened the project, saying that some actions were missing. Because the data for the actions isn’t loaded, there’s no way for FB to know how to re-save those actions.
You’ll have to toss up whether it’s more work to lose the changes you made, and keep the missing actions, or to save the changes to made, and re-add the missing actions.
If you have no other options, you could have both projects in the .fbp5 format, and then do a manual XML merge between them.
I'd like to see an actual dialog, rather than simply a message appearing on one of the tabs down the bottom, as it's something I really need to know about. Or just make the project read-only (which FB seems very reluctant to do and I'm happy with). I realise that the problem isn't resolvable, I'm trying to work out how to avoid the problem in the future.
Making the "start FB" mental process be "click quick launch icon, wait, make sure project loads, check messages tab for critical error messages" doesn't really strike me as a user-friendly approach. One of the things FB is supposed to automate away is the human tendency to forget small but important checks like that... maybe I should have a FB script that starts FB and checks for that warning?
BTW, I already redid the changes. Is it possible to list the package that needs to be added by both the name the Wizard uses and the direct package config screen? I suspect that would be tricky, but it took me a couple of guesses.
I can second this complaint - I ran into it recently. I found the error in the tab to be pretty eye-catching though. But anyway, since there seems to be no major performance penalty with loading all the packages, would it be feasible to replace the concept of loading packages with simply hiding packages? I don’t mind if actions that I never use are loaded as long as they don’t clutter the GUI. But it’s so annoying if you unload a package that you actually need, and it’s virtually impossible to be certain which ones you need…
I don’t know what kind of super-PC you’re using, but on my development machine (Athlon dual 4600 w/ Mirrored HDs) stripping down to just a few packages improves the startup time substantially.
However, I agree that working out which packages are required is currently a bit of a shell game. It’s something we can look at improving in the future.
Heh, my development machine is certainly a lot less “super” than yours. I guess I don’t rate startup time very significantly. I tend to load up 3 or 4 copies of FB in the morning then leave them open all day, so a few seconds here or there wouldn’t matter much.
I actually haven’t tried loading every package. Maybe it’s worse than I figured.