This section covers administrative issues related to Projects ߞ creating, activating, deactivating, etc. For topics covering working with Projects once created, see the User Guide .
To create a new project you must have global Administrator rights. The information in this section assumes that you already have a Subversion repository in which you can create a new folder for the new Project.
There are 2 basic scenarios for creating a Project:
Create a new empty Project from a Project Template. This creates a new folder in your repository.
Mark an existing repository folder as a Project.
It is also possible to create a project in Eclipse and share it in Polarion's Subversion repository. See Creating a New Project in Eclipse.
Polarion comes with a default Project Template Empty Project. You can create copies of this template and customize them to create new projects templates, but for now let's concentrate on the default ߝ a new project based on the Empty Project template.
To create a new Empty Project:
Log into Polarion and click Administration in the perspective selector (bottom of the left navigation).
In the Projects portlet, click Repository.
In the Topics portlet, expand the Projects node and click the Projectssub-node. A table of currently defined Projects loads in the Work Zone.
Go to the Projects table displayed in the Work Zone and click the button.
The Create New Project wizard appears:
On the first screen () fill in the fields as follows:
Location: Enter a name for the repository root folder of the new project. Note that the value entered must be valid for use in a Subversion repository path. The Url label shows the full project path as a repository URL.
Project ID: Enter a unique identifier for the project. This value identifies the new Project in the Polarion projects database. Acceptable characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, underscore, dash, and period.
Click the button. The Template wizard screen appears:
Select a template from the list of existing project templates. To create a totally new project "from scratch" select .
Click the button. The wizard screen appears showing the project parameters you have selected.
To actually create the project, you have 2 choices:
Click the button to create the project in the Repository and continue with some basic project configuration in the wizard
Click the button to create the project in the Repository and close the wizard. You can perform project configuration operations in the Administration perspective later.
You many not always want to create a new Project in Polarion "from scratch". For example, you may have an existing folder structure in your Subversion repository that you want to start managing with Polarion. In this case, you need to specify the root folder and tell Polarion to "mark" it as a project folder.
To create a new Project from an existing repository folder tree:
Log into Polarion and click Administration in the perspective selector (bottom of the left navigation. Recall that you must have global Administrator rights to access the Administration perspective.)
In the Projects portlet, click Repository.
In the Topics portlet, expand the Projects node and click the Projectssub-node. A table of currently defined Projects loads in the Working Area.
Go to the Projects table displayed in the Work Zone and click the button.
The new project wizard appears titled Mark existing location as Project.
The repository root URL appears beneath the Location field. In the edit box, type the repository path to the folder you want to mark as being a Project folder. Use forward slashes (/) to separate subfolders.
Alternatively, you can click the icon next to the Location field and select a repository folder using the SVN Picker dialog.
Navigate into folders by clicking the folder name. Select a folder as a project root by clicking the Select link in the appropriate row.
After selecting an existing SVN folder as a project root, you can proceed with the rest of the wizard steps to create and configure the new project.
To create project in Eclipse and share it in the SVN repository:
Create a project in Eclipse using its New Project wizard. For example, use "acme_sample" as a project name.
Open the context menu of your Eclipse project and select .
Select SVN as the repository type and click .
Enter the URL of the project; that is, the URL of the projects folder. With the above example project, the URL
http://localhost/repos/demo/samples/org.acme.sample/.Enter your credentials (for example, user "admin" and password "admin") and click .
Select option
Use specified module nameand entertrunkas a value. This is a standard and recommended name for a project sources folder containing the main source branch. Click and then on the next page.Now your eclipse project is shared (it is a working copy) as folder
http://localhost/repos/demo/samples/org.acme.sample/trunk/, but the contents of the project is not committed to SVN yet.Open the context menu of your project (still in Eclipse) and select .
Enter a commit comment and click . (You may be asked for some confirmations.)
Now the contents of your project are committed to the SVN repository. In our example, the project file is http://localhost/repos/demo/samples/org.acme.sample/trunk/.project.
You may sometimes need to view existing projects and make changes to a project's properties. For example, if a project is no longer active, you may want to set its status to Inactive.
In the Administration perspective, you can easily access a table listing all the Projects in Polarion's Subversion repository. You can select any Project in this table to view it's properties, and you can modify those properties for which modification is allowed.
To access the Projects table:
Click on the Repository node of the Projects portlet.
Expand the node in the Topics portlet and click the node.
Table is empty if there are no projects in the repository.
You can have projects in your repository that re not currently managed by Polarion: projects not currently under active development, for example. Removing such projects from management by Polarion does not remove any artifacts from the repository. If you want to restore a removed project (if development resumes, for example), you can do so.
To remove a Project from Polarion management:
Log in to Polarion with global administrator rights
In the Projects portlet, select the Repository node.
In the Topics portlet, select : .
The Projects table appears in the Working Area listing all projects currently being managed with Polarion.
In the Projects table, select the Project you want to stop managing with Polarion.
Click the and respond affirmatively to the confirmation prompt.
Projects in Polarion are based on a project template. Polarion comes with a single project template named Empty Project", but you can create additional templates to met your particular needs. This section provides some necessary background and explains the basic process of creating a new, custom project template.
Like other kinds of templates you are familiar with, project templates help save time creating and configuring Projects that are fundamentally the same. Basically, a template makes sense whenever it is beneficial to have some outline of a project that is predefined and can be reused for multiple new Projects. For example, you might create a project template to be used for all new Projects created for a specific team in which all project users and user roles are already defined in the template.
A project template can contain any content that a Project can contain. Here are some common things it could make sense to include:
Project folder structure (for example, trunk/branches/tags or anything going further)
Polarion project-level configuration: custom fields, workflows, dashboard configurations, even user project roles if concrete users should receive the same roles in all instantiated projects.
Using a project level configuration in a template is an alternative to using a global configuration inherited by all projects. The global configuration is more useful when generally nearly all your projects have the same settings and follow the same process (i.e. have the same configuration) and you just override it occasionally.
A Project configuration used as a template is more applicable when you have several different patterns for projects and a default global configuration is not especially useful. You can then create several templates to choose from. The disadvantage of using a project configuration as a template is that once a Project is instantiated, the configurations are no longer coupled and any subsequent changes will need to be done in all Projects instantiated prior to the change, whereas a global configuration is always stored in one place only.
Live Document templates which can be populated with Work Items after a Project is instantiated from the template.
Any general resources or their templates in a project. For example, and additional empty folders, skeletons of documentation or README files etc., based on the project type and purpose. It is also possible to include Work Items in a project template, but that could potentially cause problems with conflicting IDs as a template gets used for creating multiple projects. It is better to include Live Documents with temporary IDs. (Note, however, that Live Documents are not supported in all product editions.)
The easiest way to create a project template is to configure one model project in Polarion exactly as you would want projects based on it to look when instantiated. You then export the Project contents from the repository, accompany it with the template.properties file, in which you configure the %% replacements in any files and delete anything that should not be part of the template, and finally upload the file structure to the project templates folder in your Polarion installation, which makes the project template available to choose in the New Project wizard.
Copy the entire model project folder: it's the one in the repository named with the project ID of the model project and containing a subfolder .polarion. This path is visible on the project dashboard and is used in Create/Mark Project wizard.
The project template must contain a file named template.properties in its root. This file has a standard Java properties file format. For information about the properties of this file, see the Administration Reference: Project Templates.