Project File

A project file is an XML file which stores database information and settings of a particular project. It can be used as a good save-and-restart point for the customization process and is also useful as a trace in case of problematic generation. It is therefore a good practice to save a project file for each site you work with.

Like other XML document, project file is human-legible. You should be able to open a project file in any text editor. With a basic understanding of XML, you should be able to read an XML file and change the settings.

Each template object is represented by an XML node in the project file. The object properties are saved as attributes of the node. The property name is same as the attribute name.

Notes on Special Characters

XML documents can contain foreign characters, but it requires encoding so the data can be read by XML parser properly. The encoding of the project file is auto-detected by our products according to your computer regional setting. Generally, the detected encoding should be compatible with your language. If not, you can override the auto-detected setting by explicitly setting an encoding to the registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\<product name>\<version>\Settings\General
Value name: XMLEncodeCharSet

XML documents cannot include special characters that are not belonged to the specified XML encoding. Therefore, always avoid using special characters in your project setting. For example, iso-8859-1 does not include the euro dollar sign. If you copy and paste an euro dollar sign from somewhere to the project setting, error may occur when you save the project and the project file may become corrupted. If you must use those special characters, always use the HTML entities, e.g. use "&euro;" for the euro dollar sign. From PHP Report Maker 2, there is an alternative, you can force PHPMaker to save the project file and generate output files as utf-8 encoded files by setting the following registry key value to True (by default it is False). However, note that not all editors support utf-8 files, if you edit the utf-8 encoded output files with a Web page editor which does not support utf-8, the files might be corrupted. Only use this setting if your project cannot be saved with the native encoding.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\<product name>\<version>\Settings\General
Value name: UTF8Project

 

Auto Backup

PHP Report Maker 2+ supports auto-backup. When you save a project, the old version will be saved to the subfolder "<product name>\Backup" under the My Documents folder first, you can recover older versions of your project from the backup folder in case of corrupted projects or other accidental losses. Note that only the latest 10 versions will be kept, older versions will be deleted.

Project Name

Each project file has a project name. By default the file name (without extension) of the project file is used as project name. Before you name your project file when saving it for the first time, a temporary name, Project<n>, where n is a number, is used. The project name is an important property, it is used in the generated codes to identify your project.

Note: It is recommended that only alphanumerical characters is used in project name.

When you want to create a new project based on an existing project, you can use [Save As...] under the [Project] menu. If [Save As...] is used, the project name is changed to same as the new project file name.

Alternatively, you can also explicitly change the project name by the following steps:

1. Click [Tools] -> [Compatibility Properties] in the main menu bar,
2. Change the project name,
3. Click [OK] button

If you want to create a backup copy or another version of an existing project, use [Save a Copy...] to save the file with another name. If [Save a Copy...] is used, the project name is not changed, so the project name is not same as the file name anymore. However, with the same project name, scripts generated from these different project files will still work with each other like they are generated from the same project file.

If you use IIS (Internet Information Services), our products can create virtual directory for your project. The project name is used as virtual directory alias as well as the path under the default Web site of IIS. Therefore, if you want to create a virtual directory with a specific name, you can change the project name using [Save As...] or using the [Compatibility Properties] form first.

How to Check the Project Name of a Project File

There are 2 ways to check the project name:

1. Open your project file with the product, see the caption, the project name is shown as <Product Name> - <Project Name>, for example, if the caption is "PHP Report Maker - demo", the project name is "demo".
   
   
2. Open the project file with a text editor (e.g. Notepad), the project name can be found in the <project> tag, check the "ProjName" attribute, for example, if the <project> tag reads <Project Version="x.x.x.x." ProjName="demo" ...(omitted).../>, the project name of the project is "demo".

Also See:

Template Object Properties
Compatibility Properties Setup