The first thing is to decide what you want in the barrel. I use them to share common code between apps, and not to share with other devs. I have barrels for parts of my common watch faces, things like the background process to get weather data, etc.
The first thing then is to create a barrel project. In eclipse file>new>project>monkey barrel. And put your code/resource in that project. For simple ones, I tend to write the .mc file such that I can use a link in eclipse for the "calling project" so that apps for devices that don't support barrels uses the same code.
With auto-build in eclipse, when you save the files in a barrel project, the barrel should be built in that projects bin directory (<mybarrel>.barrel)
To add that to another project, in eclipse, right click on that project and select "configure barrels".
Jungles and eclipse links don't work together, so using the code in a barrel project with Jungles, eclipse links aren't an option, but to simply things in development you can copy the code/etc from the barrel project and make it local to your app and put it back in the barrel project when you're ready.
(don't configure the barrel, but copy <mycode>.mc to the project you are testing with, and when you're ready, copy the mc back to the barrel project and configure it)
I've never used git, but I'm thinking that a barrel project should be the same as any other CIQ project.
I don’t think there’s a good way to express version dependencies between a CIQ project and a barrel in git unless you use git submodules, which of course defeats one of the purposes of having a barrel in the first place. (A git submodule is a separate copy of an external project under your current project’s source tree, whereas a barrel exists as a library outside of your source tree.)
IOW if you use git submodules, you almost don’t need barrels.
You could still do something like this:
MyProject-root (container for project and barrel(s))
It would be awkward because you would still have a separate copy of the same barrel for each of the projects that uses it, which is clearly not the intent. But I guess any kind of shared library in git has the same issue if you use it as a submodule.
The alternatives are:
1) don’t make breaking changes in your barrels, so any future barrel versions always work with older projects
2) use barrel version numbers (in ciq) and carefully document which version of a barrel is required for each project (but then you may as well go back to submodules, if different projects require different versions, since you’ll need different copies for different versions)
from what i understand, a barrel is nothing more than a new project that we can use as a library. and from what you say, for debugging purpose, it's better to have it included in source in the project.
from an interface stand point :
* how to call/Reference function in it ?
* how about resources and/or variables ? are they global ?
vald70 I think the official doc should explain everything. They say that your barrel code should be in the form of a CIQ Module, and then you’d use it just like any other module. I suppose you could try adding global symbols to a barrel, although that wouldn’t be good practice of course.
One thing to note is there might be a slight memory overhead to using barrels, similar to the overhead of using plain modules.
The real advantage is just like any other library — the ability to easily reuse code and share it with others. For my personal projects I just share common sub folders with git submodules. In my case I don’t want or need the overhead of barrels as nobody else sees the code.
1) don’t make breaking changes in your barrels, so any future barrel versions always work with older projects
That's what I do. I may add something new, but I try hard not to break things that are there. If for some reason, I do break something, it will be something that's easy to catch in the sim (maybe adding a new parameter to a function)
