Hi All,
As you might know, Composer makes it possible to import artifacts like form templates, sysobjects and process templates from the repository into you Composer project. This great functionality currently has one slight disadvantage:
When you change an artifact in the repository (for example a form template using forms builder), you want to update your artifact in your composer project.
Right now, this can only be done by reimporting the artifact from the repository. I've spoken to EMC about this and they are figuring out a way to make this process easier as we speak! However, for the time being, this reimporting of artifacts results in duplicate "content" files in the content folder of your project. This might and will lead to an increase of project size (in both files and bytes) which is unnecessary.
Just for this purpose, me and my colleague Harke Harkema, have created this little attached plugin for Composer. The plugin is currently tested against Composer 6.5 and Composer 6.5 SP1
Before I explain what this plugin does let me first tell you:
USE THIS PLUGIN AT YOUR OWN RISK, WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA WHATSOEVER. IF YOU'RE NOT SURE THIS PLUGIN IS WHAT YOU WANT DON'T USE IT!
So, now that we have that out of the way, I can explain its usage:
1. The plugin is installed by placing it in the "plugins" folder of your composer.
2. (Re)start composer
3. Now, when you right click on a Documentum Project there should be a new item just below "Install Documentum Project" called: "VLC Documentum tools" > "Clean content Folder"
4. This plugin will iterate ALL artifacts and list all content files associated to these artifacts
5. It then will compare this list to all content items in the "content" folder of the project and delete all content files that aren't used in current artifacts.
6. After this the plugin will show you how many files and bytes were deleted.
We use this plugin at our current project and (after developing for 4 months) we cleared up some 40Mb of unused content files.
The plugin will skip CVS folders, so that your CVS metadata isn't touched. We didn't test this plugin in a SVN environment, so you might lose SVN data in your contents folder (I don't think that should be a big problem but you might).
Just to ease your minds a little: EMC Composer engineering team had a look at the source of this plugin and they thought it was usable and ready to post here.
Enjoy!
Kees van Bemmel
www.vlc.nl
PS The reason that VLC Documentum tools has a sub-menu is because of the fact that we have a Star-UML model generator in the making which will create an object model representation in Star-UML, representing all custom object types and their relations in your Composer project.
