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Chris_Moesel's avatar
Chris_Moesel
Occasional Contributor
17 years ago

Improve Portability of Projects

It's possible that some of this is already possible-- please let me know if that's the case.

I'd like for soapUI Pro to be more portable.  In other words, I would like to have my soapUI Pro project and all its needed artifacts in a single directory that I can check into source control.  Then someone else can install soapUI Pro on their machine, import the project, and be ready to go.

For instance, I would like to be able to:
- load groovy scripts from MyProjectDir/scripts
- load 3rd party jars from MyProjectDir/ext (I know, that's hard)
- load properties files from MyProjectDir/properties
- for attachments in messages, specify files relative to the project dir

I'd much rather put all these things in my project directory than add and modify things in the soapUI installation directory.  It makes upgrades much easier and (as mentioned previously) makes portability much easier.

Thanks,
Chris

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  • omatzura's avatar
    omatzura
    Super Contributor
    17 years ago
    Hi Chris,

    thanks for your post! These are all good ideas.. soapUI Pro currently handles both the external and script libraries globally, ie they are not project-specific.. we would probably need to fix that first (ie to open up for project-specific jars and scripts, we could even store these in the project...)

    The upcoming 1.7.6 release will improve on the "Import Settings" functionality to also (optionally) import scripts and external jars, which makes this a bit easier to move configurations around; you could distribute a zip containing only the bin\soapui-settings, bin\ext and bin\scripts folders which users could import from, once unzipped..)

    Also, we are planning a revised "project-persistance" model, where each item is stored in a seperate file instead of everything in one file.. which would make teamwork and scm-integration alot more flexible..

    A number of global properties are planned to be used in property-expansion, including something like a "projectDir" property which you could use to load your properties from.. ie you could specify something like "${#projectDir}/props.txt" in the PropertiesStep source file (or where ever else..)

    Hope this is a bit comforting for now.. thanks for sharing your ideas, and don't hesitate to comment on/challenge the above!

    regards,

    /Ole
    eviware.com
  • Chris_Moesel's avatar
    Chris_Moesel
    Occasional Contributor
    17 years ago
    Hi Ole,

    It looks like you're taking steps in the right direction.  I like the idea of a "projectDir" property.  The new project persistence module sounds interesting too.

    Thanks for noting my requests-- handling scripts and libraries within project scope would really be a great feature in my opinion.  Thanks for at least considering it.

    Again, I appreciate your thorough response and look forward to future version of soapUI Pro!