Bug 311593

Description Mark D-B 2010-05-04 13:54:12 EDT

If I open two Artifact Explorers, on different branches, I can drag an artifact from one to the other and the "Confirm Inter Artifact Explorer Drop" window appears, asking whether I want to introduce the artifact into the destination branch as a new transaction.

Now, this is really clever, as it means that I can copy a piece of work from one branch to another but keep the same artifact IDs, which will make merging and lots of other things easier in the future.

I can select a whole bunch of artifacts, and drag-and-drop them. However, if I do that, I lose their hierarchy. This is the same as if I copy and paste them, so isn't unreasonable.

However, what if I want to copy a bunch of related artifacts from one branch to another, and maintain their hierarchy? If I do a copy and paste special, with the "Include children of copied artifacts" box ticked, I get new artifact IDs, which isn't what I want.

Could we have a new menu option, which is only accessible when a copy is done on one branch and a right-click is then done on another, called "Introduce ...", with the same options as paste-special please? This could then allow whole hierarchies to be copied from one branch to another, maintaining artifact IDs, which would be a good way of achieving re-use when only part of the work on a branch is wanted.

Note: This enhancement may not be necessary depending on the outcome of https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=311592, which could mean that the hierarchy gets preserved anyway.