Workspaces

IBM Industry Solutions Workbench 4.1.0 introduces a new way to organize your work. You can now create Workspaces based on your work items and add the projects you are working on to this workspace.

This allows you to focus on certain projects and reduces the time spent on searching for projects. You could for example create a workspace for an application composition project you are currently working on and add also the service projects you need to develop to this workspace. This way you have all pieces in one place that will belong together later. You could also group projects into workspaces that have a common topic or are simply the ones you are interested in.

Introduction

Workspaces can help you organize your work by grouping the projects you are working on into different views. Therefore, you can create as many workspaces as you need. You can add as many projects to a workspace as you want and these can be of any project type. This means you can add any number of application composition projects or service projects to a workspace. The projects in a workspace don't need to have any relation to each other. It is totally up to you how you define your workspaces.

Every workspace has a name that you can change at any time and also a short description that you can use to give a brief overview of the projects inside the workspace. This can help you organize when you have multiple workspaces and will be displayed on a workspace's card in the overview. Furthermore, a workspace also has a dedicated description area providing a WYSIWYG text editor that you can use to document or describe information related to the projects inside this workspace. This can be your personal notes, implementation hints, requirements or just anything you want to have in reach when working on these projects. You can edit this description as soon as the workspace is created.

Note: Workspaces do not have any effect on the projects they contain. It is a means of organization and does not offer any project-related configuration or similar. If you create a project inside a workspace, it will still be visible on the All projects page for all users who have at least read access to the Git repository in which the project resides.

Create a workspace

To create a new workspace visit the Workspaces page in Solution Designer by using the Workspaces link in the navigation bar and click on the Create button. If this will be your first workspace, you can also click on the dummy workspace card to create a new workspace.

Create a workspace manually

You then have to give this workspace a name (can be changed at any time) and optionally put a short description in the Notes field that will be displayed on the card of the workspace in the Workspaces overview.

The dialog also lets you quickly add projects to the new workspace by selecting existing projects from the table. Every selected project will be added directly, but you can still add projects later on.

Create a workspace based on a token

In case a co-worker shared a workspace token you easily can create a duplicate of the workspace by selecting the second option. In this case you only have to provide the token and the workspace will be created automatically for you. Name, notes, description and all the projects are added to that workspace.

Add projects to a workspace

You can add projects to a workspace at any time by clicking on the Add project button. This will open a dialog where you can choose if you want to

Add one or more existing project(s) to this workspace
Create a new project from scratch and add it to this workspace
Create project from asset and add it to this workspace

Add existing project(s)

By clicking on Add existing project(s), you can add any kind of existing project to this workspace. You can add multiple projects at once by selecting them from the list of all available projects. When you are done with the selection, click on Save.

Create project from scratch

By clicking on Create project from scratch, you can create a new project and add it to this workspace. This can be any project type and any implementation language.

If you need to create multiple new projects simply repeat this step.

Create project from asset

By clicking on Create project from asset, you will be guided to the wizard and the created project will be added to this workspace.

If you need to create multiple projects simply repeat this step.

Edit details of a workspace

By clicking on the Edit details button, you can edit the name of the workspace and also the notes that are displayed on the workspace's card in the My workspaces overview.

Stop workspace synchronization to a source workspace

In case you no longer want to be in sync with the workspace a co-workerd shared with you, simply use the Stop workspace synchronization capability. After removing the connection you will no longer be able to synchronize with the source workspace.

Note: The option mentioned above is only available for a workspace that was created based on a shared token.

Edit description of a workspace

By clicking on the Edit description button, you open the WYSIWIG text editor. This editor takes Markdown input and also allows you to draw plantUML diagrams in order to add some notes or important information to a workspace. See documentation for further details on how to use the text editor.

Synchronize a workspace

In case you created a workspace based on a token you can use Synchronize on the top to get the latest updates from the source workspace.

Note: Please note that any changes you have made in the description and projects for this workspace will be overwritten during synchronization. The description and the projects will be displayed according to the source workspace. The option mentioned above is only available for a workspace that was created based on a shared token.

Delete a workspace

Use the Delete workspace button in the top right corner of a workspace's page to delete the workspace. You will be asked to confirm this action.