Projects and Libraries

When working in Design Studio, you can have any number of projects open at any time. The purpose of a project is to develop a library containing a collection of robots and the files required by these robots. Typically, you create a project for each separate usage of robots, such as one project for each application in your company that uses robots. Two projects cannot share files; a type always belongs to one project, and the scope of a type is the project it belongs to.

A project is a folder located anywhere in the file system. The project folder can have any name you want, but must contain the Library sub-folder.

Library

This folder contains the library of the project.

Place all robot files, type files, and other files used by the robots, such as files that are loaded from the robot library in the Library folder. You can organize the files in the Library folder using subfolders as appropriate.

The following example shows a project folder named NewsAndStocksProject for a project that develops a robot library for extracting news from news sites and stock quotes from stock sites.

NewsAndStocksProject/
    Library/
       News/
          CNN.robot
          Reuters.robot
          News.type
       Stocks/
          Nasdaq.robot
          NYSE.robot
          Stocks.type

Note that this project has a Library folder with robot and type files divided into News and Stocks subfolders.

When you close Design Studio, it remembers the projects and files open. The next time you open Design Studio, it will open the same projects and files.

Current Project

In Design Studio you can work with many projects, but the other applications in Kofax RPA, such as RoboServer, always work on a specific project, referred to as the current project. When you install Kofax RPA, a default project is created. This project is selected as current. If you open Design Studio the first time, this current project is the only opened project. If you close all projects before you close Design Studio, the next time you open Design Studio it opens the selected current project.

You can change the current project selection using the Settings application, specifying the path to your new project folder in the Current Project Folder property in the Project tab, and then clicking OK to close Settings. Please see the Kofax RPA Developer's Guide for more information.

Shared Project

Shared project is a project that is deployed on a Management Console and connected to a project on your local Design Studio computer. Management Console project can be shared between several Design Studios, thus several people can edit a project. When your shared project is out of sync with the project on the Management Console, the Management Console section in the My Projects pane visualizes the status of each object in the project. You can use different strategies when synchronizing your local copy with one deployed on the Management Console.