Disconnected C/C++ Development

Rational Developer for Power Systems Software has limited 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, changes you make to your project files will be cached locally and tracked in the Remote Reconciler View.

You will not be able to build or debug your projects, as you will not have a connection to the remote POWER system, but you can still edit and analyze the code almost identically as you could if you were connected to the remote system.

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.

 

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.