Abandoning file changes to multiple files - Please help!!!

Hello aletik,

I read many threads regarding autosave 'feature'. I'm using IJ 6.0 and
it seems to save every time I exit the application or close the
project. I know that people asked how to disable this feature and got
very polite answers to essensially buzz off and that's it is very
usefull b/c there is a buid-in VSS.

As a new user who is used to JBuilder and want to get "used" to the
new Idea, but my question is this.... Imagine that I opened 20 random
files put some java comments in random 15 of them; closed the project,
multiproject or the whole app (probably closing is not even needed as
everything autosaved anyway) and opened it again and want to abandon
my changes to these 15 files. I know that you can go to each of them
in build-in slightly primitive VSS and reverse the changes... but
imagine that I simply don't remember what files I changed and totally
refuse to do it one by one ???????

If there is no such issue please explain to me how to deal with it
using the new "Idea" ???

I'm sorry to say that, but making it possible to revert random changes made
to random files made without any meaning or purpose was not one of the use
cases we considered important when developing IntelliJ IDEA.

However, the built-in local history lets you view the history of changes
you made to the entire project, and not only to individual files. You can
use it to rollback your changes even if you don't remember exactly what files
you changed.

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

Dmitry,

I'm a smart guy and almost always know what changes I intended to do, however remembering every file I changed makes no sense to me. I kind of want some feature to bail out if I need to. Why,
simply b/c some of the projects I'm importing from Jbuilder have thousands of files in many and many packages and sometimes people, me including, want to be on the safe side. I'm not really a person who forgets to save files when needed.

Also sometimes it's very time consuming to search thru VSS to find what was changed - you need to look at dates and file contents/versions.
Again, I'm being very polite and asking for a simplet answer to my question.... :)

If this is a company project, you probably needed to check it out of a
source control system, so you could always revert the files to the
checked-in version.
If you're writing a personal project, I suggest installing a Subversion
server. It is lightweight enough to run at home, free and will probably
save you a lot of time in the long run beyond this problem.
One of the things to remember about local history is that by default it
only remembers 3 active days, so if in a week (of daily work with IDEA)
you want to revert something the history is lost.

Hope this helps,
Amnon

Dmitry Jemerov wrote:

Hello aletik,

>> I read many threads regarding autosave 'feature'. I'm using IJ 6.0 and
>> it seems to save every time I exit the application or close the
>> project. I know that people asked how to disable this feature and got
>> very polite answers to essensially buzz off and that's it is very
>> usefull b/c there is a buid-in VSS.
>>
>> As a new user who is used to JBuilder and want to get "used" to the
>> new Idea, but my question is this.... Imagine that I opened 20 random
>> files put some java comments in random 15 of them; closed the project,
>> multiproject or the whole app (probably closing is not even needed as
>> everything autosaved anyway) and opened it again and want to abandon
>> my changes to these 15 files. I know that you can go to each of them
>> in build-in slightly primitive VSS and reverse the changes... but
>> imagine that I simply don't remember what files I changed and totally
>> refuse to do it one by one ???????
>>
>> If there is no such issue please explain to me how to deal with it
>> using the new "Idea" ???

I'm sorry to say that, but making it possible to revert random changes
made to random files made without any meaning or purpose was not one of
the use cases we considered important when developing IntelliJ IDEA.
However, the built-in local history lets you view the history of changes
you made to the entire project, and not only to individual files. You
can use it to rollback your changes even if you don't remember exactly
what files you changed.

Dmitry Jemerov wrote:

I'm sorry to say that, but making it possible to revert random changes
made to random files made without any meaning or purpose was not one of
the use cases we considered important when developing IntelliJ IDEA.
However, the built-in local history lets you view the history of changes
you made to the entire project, and not only to individual files. You
can use it to rollback your changes even if you don't remember exactly
what files you changed.

A polite buzz off, indeed ;)
I never ever had the desire to control saving myself. In fact I never had
to think about saving at all. Though of course using a grown up VCS for
each and every toy project helps a lot.

That said, I sometimes use the local VCS if I want to test drive some risky
changes without creating noise in svn.

Dmitry, how do you actually see the project history in local VCS?
Best I have found so far is selecting a module in the project view and see
the history for that single module.

Also I think the history view should be improved. The table at the bottom
is mostly one column with date/time and two blank columns to the right
of that.
It's not even sufficient to select a revision, to see what has changed in
that particular revision. By default the tree above always compares to the
most recent revision.
What do you think of a third column that shows which files have changed in
that particular version (short names, list abbreviated with "..." if needed).
That would allow for a much quicker overview.

a> Also sometimes it's very time consuming to search thru VSS to find
a> what was changed - you need to look at dates and file
a> contents/versions.

That's what the changes view is there for. You only need to search the vcs
when you want to find changes other made. And idea also has the vcs status
tool to quickly show you that also.

Hello Stephen,

Dmitry, how do you actually see the project history in local VCS?
Best I have found so far is selecting a module in the project view and see
the history for that single module.

Well, ahem, yes. There's no "project" node that you can click on and invoke
"local history".

Also I think the history view should be improved. The table at the bottom
is mostly one column with date/time and two blank columns to the right

of that.

It's not even sufficient to select a revision, to see what has changed in
that particular revision. By default the tree above always compares to the
most recent revision.
What do you think of a third column that shows which files have changed in
that particular version (short names, list abbreviated with "..." if needed).
That would allow for a much quicker overview.

Could you please file a JIRA request? We're rewriting the local history now,
and the change could go nicely with the new implementation.

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

Dimitry wasn't buzzing you off.. the History functionality is what you want... this post was a while ago, but going forward, just take a history snapshot of your project and give it a meaningful name. Then you ca rollback to that point. Actually, the History functionality is even finer-grained than that.. you can roll back individual method changes on individual classes if you want... I would rather have History than CVS or Subversion if I had to chose amongst them.. it's a life saver...

Geez, I'm going to have to start going through the features of IDEA. I keep finding discussions in this newsgroup about functionality that I didn't even know it had.