Working with Projects

Once connected to your workspace, you have access to all the data stored in it. All projects, project documents, components, and file templates will be available to you and you can work with them from any computer anywhere! The most important thing is that the usual operations with project files have not changed - the process is as easy and clear as the traditional one. In the previous chapter, we created a workspace with the Include sample data option enabled, so our workspace already contains project examples. Let's open one of the projects.

Select File > Open Project from main menus to access the Open Project dialog.

The Open Project command in main menus — **Fig. 1** - The **Open Project** command

On the left side of the Open Project dialog in the LOCATIONS region, select your workspace. After selecting, the main section of the dialog will show all projects that are stored in the connected workspace. Select the project you want to work with then click Open at the lower-right corner of the dialog.

If the project is opening for the first time on your computer, it will take a little time to download it to your local storage first.

After your project is loaded into local storage, it will be displayed in the Projects panel with all its associated files. Each project from your workspace has an icon to the right of the project name that indicates the current state of the project in comparison with the workspace version. In the figure below, all files display as up-to-date since no updates to the local versions have been made.

Project is opened and shown in Projects panel — **Fig. 3** - Project is opened

Now you can interact with the project the same as before by opening the desired document and performing your work! After modifying a file in the project, it will be saved in local storage and state icon will appear to the right of the file name indicating it has been modified. This state icon means that the file on your computer is different from the file that is currently storing in the cloud. This is logical because the file was only saved on your computer. For other team members to have access to the actual version of this file with all the latest changes, the cloud version of the file must be updated.

**Fig. 4** - File 2_power.SchDoc has been modified and displays the corresponding ‘modified’ icon

To update a file in the cloud, you need to save the project on the workspace. Right-click on the project name in the Projects panel then select Save to Server.

Starting the process of saving files to the cloud by running Save to Server option in project context menu — **Fig. 5** - Starting the process of saving files to the cloud

The Commit to Version Control dialog opens and displays all files within the project that are different from the cloud version. We recommend you enter a Comment that will let other designers know what changes have been made and also will allow for more detailed tracking of the project in the future. Click Commit And Push to save the project to the cloud, after which all modified files in the Projects panel will display the up-to-date icon.

Tip: Entering a comment is optional, but it creates a complete log of the work done on the project.