What does Reload Current Project do?

[Jamie_Campbell]

Can anyone tell me what the Reload Current Project option on the File menu actually does?
Our setup is an Oracle back end with SourceSafe as the configuration management tool.
I'm a little concerned about what the reload options does: does it reload from SourceSafe or does it refresh from the database?
I suspect (and hope) it's the latter and I'm worrying unnecessarily.

[thomaskilian]

It "simulates" a close/open EA; just re-read the contents of the database. Useful if the database is changed while EA is running. There is no mechanism to make EA aware of changes. So you have to reload it.

[Dave_Bullet]

Sometimes, EA will detect the contents of a package has been changed and prompt you to reload.

For changes to elements within a project not reloadable under the browser (ie. resources such as UML profiles, RTF templates etc...) - project level reload is the only way to refresh these.

Cheers,
David.

[Jamie_Campbell]

Thanks for the quick (as usual) responses.
It looks like it is a "safe" operation

[«Midnight»]

Generally this should be safe, in that your add-in would likely have encountered a severe error if you'd accessed anything that would not have been there after the reload.

I had occasion to test this...

Back in the darker ages there were considerably more things that could not be reloaded individually, so I had far more occasion to reload the project through automation. I also had an application where it was necessary to have my add-in running on one thread, with a second thread available to the UI (as well as some database code). The second thread would often tweak the database directly, which the add-in could not detect. This required that I reload parts of the project very often. I often had 'phantom' copies of packages (and such) show up in the Project Browser, representing entities that had been changed, and were shown (in their correct form) elsewhere. Sometimes could even open up diagrams and such in these deleted packages. Closing the project (i.e. exiting all add-ins and shutting down from the UI) and then reopening solved the problem, but was unacceptable from the automation point of view.

I switched to reloading the project via the API call. Zero problems, not a one.

David