Pinned Items - Styles, Variables, Etc.

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trent the thief
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Posts: 614
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Pinned Items - Styles, Variables, Etc.

Post by trent the thief »

Ever wonder where the config for those things lives?

Look at one of these locations for an example of PinnedStyles.xml:

"ProjDirectory\Project\Users\YourName\PinnedStyles.xml"
--- or ---
"ProjDirectory\FileSync\Base\Project\Users\YourName\PinnedStyles/xml"

(The difference has something to do with the project type, but I don't know what that might be.)

Since the Pinned files live outside the Project and the Content, there doesn't seem to be a way to grab them via Imports or via Source Control without messing around with the the User directories in the stock .gitignore file. I haven't touched mine and I really don't want to risk git/central choking to death on my project.

You can manually shuffle the PinnedStyles.xml to any project that uses the same stylesheet. Well, you can put it anywhere, but pinning a style you don't have won't be very helpful.

Here's the internal layout:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<PinnedItems>
    <PinnedItem Name="a.makeMiddle" />
    <PinnedItem Name=".MenuPath" />
</PinnedItems>
There are four Pin files:

Code: Select all

PinnedImages.xml
PinnedSnippets.xml
PinnedStyles.xml
PinnedVariables.xml
and "Recent*.xmls" for those items, too.

The UserData.fluser file identifies (at the very least) the Primary Target. It could possibly contain other "Primary" info depending on the project, but I don't know.

There might be Pin files for micro-content, but these projects didn't have any.
Trent.

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umm...
I meant MAD Certified.

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_[shapeonthewall]_
Propeller Head
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Nov 19, 2019 9:01 am
Location: Scotland

Re: Pinned Items - Styles, Variables, Etc.

Post by _[shapeonthewall]_ »

I came across your post in a search result when I was looking for a description of those files. Until today I hadn't seen them before...

A few days ago my dev team migrated my Flare repo from TFS-bound version control to an Azure Git repo. This had been on my list of things to do for ages, and I am excited to be finally using Git. I cloned the repo locally using Visual Studio Code, and then I opened the Flare project in Flare (I use 2023 r2). I'm using VS Code to manage the git workflow, and Flare to author.

In VS Code, when looking in Explorer view at the list of files in the Flare project, I noticed the appearance of six untracked files. They are listed in the Project directory at:

C:\RepoName\ProjectName\Project\Users\myusername
  • PinnedImages
  • PinnedSnippets
  • PinnedVariables
  • RecentImages
  • RecentSnippets
  • RecentVariables
I can only see them from within the Visual Studio Code interface.

They're not visible on Azure DevOps or in Flare.

Because they're untracked, I have to guess they were generated by Flare when I opened the project file from the local clone. And I'm going to ignore them until I know what I should be doing with them... (Maybe that will be ignoring forever, or pushing them, or something else.)
Flare 2024 bound to Azure Git via Visual Studio Code
AlexFox
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 246
Joined: Thu Oct 19, 2017 1:56 am

Re: Pinned Items - Styles, Variables, Etc.

Post by AlexFox »

Flare generates a .gitignore for these files when binding to source control such as ADO, and it doesn't show them in the Flare client by design as they are metadata. They simply tell Flare the pinned and recently used content in Variables, Images, Snippets etc. (for the respective Insert... dialogues).
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