ISE 7.1 small advice about project files (.ISE extension)

Hi

just a little thing: starting from 7.1 ISE abondoned the use of plain text
project files, the new project files with .ISE extension are PKZIP
compressed - that can cause an additional problem if ISE is not closed
correctly as the ZIP archive could corrupted rendering it totally useless,
ISE will refuse to open and use it. And there is no recovery, the project
must be done from scratch - well its only the project file and can mostly
easily be recreated, still if your computer (or ISE on it) can occasionally
be doing crash, then I would say its a good idea to make manual backups of
the ISE project files. Just in case.

For me it was real surprise, I was working on project, configured the FPGA
'live' on the PCI board in the same computer, re-enabled the BARs run a test
on that thing, it did froze the PC, well seing that the ISE project was
corrupted after that was a bit scary. Well that the price you pay if you
dont use plain text files, I really dont see any advantage that ISE now uses
compressed project files that can not be manually edited, in previous
releases I often did edit the .NPL files in text editor, thats not possible
any more

Antti
BTW the word "ise" means in estonian language me(myself)
so therotecial conversation
Q: What was the reason for the crash?
A: ISE    (as Xilinx ISE)

the answer (in estonian) would/could be understood that its YOUR fault.
But its not our (the customers) fault if tools fail.

Antti Lukats wrote:
> Hi
> 
> just a little thing: starting from 7.1 ISE abondoned the use of plain text
> project files, the new project files with .ISE extension are PKZIP
> compressed - that can cause an additional problem if ISE is not closed
> correctly as the ZIP archive could corrupted rendering it totally useless,
> ISE will refuse to open and use it. And there is no recovery, the project
> must be done from scratch - well its only the project file and can mostly
> easily be recreated, still if your computer (or ISE on it) can occasionally
> be doing crash, then I would say its a good idea to make manual backups of
> the ISE project files. Just in case.
> 
> For me it was real surprise, I was working on project, configured the FPGA
> 'live' on the PCI board in the same computer, re-enabled the BARs run a test
> on that thing, it did froze the PC, well seing that the ISE project was
> corrupted after that was a bit scary. Well that the price you pay if you
> dont use plain text files, I really dont see any advantage that ISE now uses
> compressed project files that can not be manually edited, in previous
> releases I often did edit the .NPL files in text editor, thats not possible
> any more

  Sounds more like they goofed on when to open/close, more than the Zip.
If it is zipped, and properly closed when not changed, you should be
able to unzip outside ISE, and even edit - and if it was well behaved
like any text editor, it would say "Project file has changed outside ISE 
- reload?"
  I'd raise it as a web case, and tell them to fix the open/close 
handling. [ but their list is getting quite long ....]

-jg

> corrupted after that was a bit scary. Well that the price you pay if you
> dont use plain text files, I really dont see any advantage that ISE now uses
> compressed project files that can not be manually edited, in previous
> releases I often did edit the .NPL files in text editor, thats not possible
> any more
>
I have to agree on that point. It's very annoying that the project file is
not in plain text anymore. I'm used to change project setting (a.g. add VHDL
files) in an editor. Usually tools add files with absolute paths (that's the
case in Quartus, I don't know in ISE). Than you can't transfer your project
to a different directory/machine/user. When adding the files manually in
the project file you can use relativ paths and you're fine.

Martin 

Martin Schoeberl wrote:
> > corrupted after that was a bit scary. Well that the price you pay if you
> > dont use plain text files, I really dont see any advantage that ISE now uses
> > compressed project files that can not be manually edited, in previous
> > releases I often did edit the .NPL files in text editor, thats not possible
> > any more
> >
> I have to agree on that point. It's very annoying that the project file is
> not in plain text anymore. I'm used to change project setting (a.g. add VHDL
> files) in an editor. Usually tools add files with absolute paths (that's the
> case in Quartus, I don't know in ISE). Than you can't transfer your project
> to a different directory/machine/user. When adding the files manually in
> the project file you can use relativ paths and you're fine.
>
> Martin

I've heard too many horror stories about 7.1 to upgrade yet, and
probably
won't until I start to use Virtex 4.  In 6.1 at least the project
navigator
uses relative paths to source files and also allows you to convert from
absolute to relative paths.