Disconnected C/C++ Development

Rational Developer for AIX and Linux has capabilities for working on your C/C++ projects while disconnected from the remote server.In the status area of the workbench is a button which both indicates the offline/online status of the workbench, as well as allows you to switch back and forth between online mode and offline mode.

Online/Offline button location

Offline Mode

To switch to Offline Mode, simply click the Go Offline button.

Go Offline button

If you do not already have a local, non-mounted location associated with the project, then the IDE will then make a copy of your remote project files to your local workspace. This can be a time consuming process if you have a large number of projects or projects which individually are large themselves, whether in terms of the number of files they contain or the size of the files contained.

While in Offline Mode, your projects will use a Local context for development. Changes you make to your project files will be cached locally and uploaded to the remote server once you connect again.

The first time you switch to Offline Mode for a given project, you will be presented with a wizard to configure the Local context for use. The information and choices presented in this dialog will depend on your client operating system, but essentially they are required in order to configure your project so that it builds and parses properly in that context. See Working with multiple machines and contexts for more information.

Your tooling experience using a Local context will be different depending upon your client machine's operating system. On Linux systems, the full set of tooling is supported, including edit, navigation, source analysis, build, debugging, code coverage, and performance analysis. You should note however that not all tools will behave identically compared to your experience running on remote systems due to differences in hardware and also underlying operating system support (for details on this, consult the documentation on the tools in question). On Windows systems, only editing, source navigation, and source analysis are enabled.

When using a local context on Windows, there may however be differences in results from parsing-based features such as Content Assist, Navigation, C/C++ Search, Call Hierarchy, Type Hierarchy, and the Include Browser. This is because only your remote project files will be pulled to the local system and tracked by the Remote Reconciler while you are in offline mode, i.e., no system include files or third party header files will be copied. This may hinder the ability of the parser and indexer to properly parse and index your project source code, but the parser will attempt to parse your code as well as is possible without this information. On Linux systems, you will have the usual Linux system headers available to you, but the content of those headers may be different to what you are using on other machines, not to mention built-in preprocessor symbols are likely to be different, so your code may be parsed differently than it is on other machines.

 

Switching Back To Online Mode

To switch back to Online Mode, simply click the Go Online button.

Go Online button

The IDE will then attempt to reconnect to the remote system and push all of your changes to it. Normal remote editing, build, indexing, and debug operations will then once again be possible as they were before you went into Offline Mode.