branching in IDEA

Hello phil,

whenever we branch (we use perforce), the branch has it's own
directory structure. This means I need to set up a completely new
project for this branch. Does IDEA facilitate this in anyway (copy
project but with a different root path) or do most people just start a
new project?

The project files usually store all paths as relative, so you don't need
much facilitation - you simply copy the project (or even better, store it
in P4 and branch together with the rest of the code).

--
Dmitry Jemerov
Development Lead
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"

well, you can always try it yourself

just open all *.ipr,*.iws,*.iml files
they contain all configuration for current project
these files are in plain text format (not binary), actually it's xml format
try to find your project root directory name in these files
Dmitry Jemerov suggested that this operation will fail

but usually there are some occurences in these files (e.g. they could be put their by 3rdparty plugins)

so, after copying these files to the new project root you need to change these lines and voila