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This plug-in is similar to Sort
Documents in the functionality however it is automatic.
Document Rules plug-in allows you to specify document
sorting rules for different projects. Then you can sort out
documents among the projects with one click of a mouse.
The idea of this feature is simple. When you work on many
projects at once, you may forget to switch between them and
therefore documents belonging to one project may be logged into
another project. To simplify the task of keeping track of documents
belonging to different projects, many users place all the files
related to one project into a separate folder. In most cases,
applications do report the path to the document file you work with,
thus making it possible to identify the project to which the
document should belong right away.
Instead of manually shuffling documents between projects, you
might want to specify that any document that contains certain text
in its title should be placed into a certain project automatically.
A set of such text strings that shows which documents belong to a
project is called the project document rule. When you apply
the rule to a project, the plug-in scans through the documents of
the project and tries to find a project to which the document might
belong based on the rules specified for the projects.
Let's review the whole process on an example.
- You need to work on two projects. You create two projects in
VPT and call them Project 1 and Project 2.
- You create two new folders on your system: C:\Projects\Prj1\
and C:\Projects\Prj2\. All files related to Project 1 will be
stored in folder Prj1 and files of Project 2 will be stored in
Prj2.
- You define a document rule in each of the projects like this:
- In Project 1: document names should start with
"C:\Projects\Prj1\"
- In Project 2: document names should start with
"C:\Projects\Prj2\"
- Then you create a third "dummy" project and make it
default (you may even close Projects 1 and 2 for now). All
documents that you work on (for both projects) will be logged
into this dummy project.
- After you are done, just select the dummy project in the list
and select "Apply Rules" command from the menu. Then
you pick "Project 1" and "Project 2" to be
used as targets of the operation.
- The plug-in will analyze every document record in the dummy
project and if the document's title starts with
"C:\Projects\Prj1\", it will be moved to Project 1
automatically. The same will happen with documents belonging to
Project 2.
- If a document title didn't match any document rule, it will
stay in the dummy project. You can use the Sort Documents
plug-in to analyze the list of remaining documents and make sure
there's no document belonging to another project left. If there
is, you can move them manually or modify the rule to include
those documents and run the "Apply Rules" command
again.
When you install the plug-in, it will add two new commands to the
Project menu in VPT: Specify Rules and Apply Rules.
The same two commands are also available from project pop-up menu in
"Applications and open documents" tree list:
Specify Rules
This command invokes the dialog that allows you to define
document rules for the selected project.
You can add several strings to the rule set. A document title
will be matched against all of them. If at least one match is found,
the document will be moved to this project.
You can
use wildcard characters '?' and '*' to construct complex conditions. '?' stands for any character,
and '*' for any sequence of characters. For example
"http:*" means any document title that starts with
"http:".
"C:*.cpp" stands for any document whose title starts
with "C:" and ends with ".cpp". Similarly
"*\Project?\*" means that any document containing
"\Project1\", "\ProjectX\", or similar strings
will be moved to this project.
If you do not specify ? or * in the rule string, the text will be
searched for at any position in the document title (that is, the
document title should contain the text anywhere).
Apply Rules
This command allows to move document records from the currently
selected project into any number of specified projects. The dialog
that appears allows you to specify the projects to include into the
process of sorting out the document records:
Place checkmarks next to the projects which you want to use as
targets for sorting document. Document rules from these projects
will be used to determine if a document form the current project
should be moved to them.
Download the plug-in here:
Requires: No additional
files required.
See the installation instructions here: Installing and using VPT plugins
Return to Plug-in Listing.
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