Asset Manager

[Christoph Hart]

@David-Healey yes good idea. So ideally you could define a wildcard for user editable config files - if they dont exist they are copied over but they are not deleted / overriden when updated or uninstalled.

[David Healey]

@Christoph-Hart Yes that would be ideal.

[Christoph Hart]

@David-Healey should this also extend to preprocessor definitions? I think currently it removes them but there might be a case for a similar usage there

[David Healey]

@Christoph-Hart Yes that would make sense

[David Healey]

@Christoph-Hart In addition to script files I can see a situation where I would want to include a project xml as a starting template. So that would be another file I'd want to allow the user to change.

[Christoph Hart]

@David-Healey that should be covered by that wildcard function, any file that matches against that wildcard would be excluded from the deinstallation procedure (and before installing it checks if it exists, then does nothing). A big XML file would be a bit tricky though - you can never change that template file because it would never be updated - with script files you can branch out your config stuff into a seperate smaller file.

[David Healey]

@Christoph-Hart said in Asset Manager:

A big XML file would be a bit tricky though - you can never change that template file because it would never be updated

Good point. Maybe I'll just use another script and the Builder stuff to construct the template's module tree instead.

[David Healey]

@Christoph-Hart Regarding templates I had another idea, what about using .hip files?

The user could load one, resave it as an xml and build it out. If I make changes to the template in the future it shouldn't affect their work and could safely overwrite the previous version when they install the update.

[David Healey]

Found a little consistency issue.

The documentation gives this example:

{
  "FileTypes": ["Scripts", "Images"],
  "PositiveWildcard": ["*"]
}

However I've found that Scripts and Images need to have a trailing slash or the files aren't copied. DspNetworks though doesn't need a trailing slash and adding one causes the networks to not copy.

[Christoph Hart]

@David-Healey Oh good spotting, this might come from the fact that there's some internal path normalization but the wildcards do not use this.

BTW, I've added another feature to the asset manager last week: you can define a SharedWildcard which allows you to define files that might be shared across multiple of your assets - the asset installer will then skip them at installation / deinstallation (and verifies that they don't conflict when installing two assets that share files).