Jesse Good

Jesse Good said:

how is the "Location Path" decided and how do I update this?

This is determined by the project templates... empty by default:

Each template can have its own default location which is handy if you want to organise your work by customer and have the projects stored against the customer for example.

Open Project and Open Document (single file project) work by remembering the last place you looked.  Open Project will look for last project parent folders for example so it's more likely to be useful than opening the same project.  Open document will open the last location you used for the source you selected.

This isn't a documented mechanism as far as I'm aware... it's only something I've observed.  Daniel Brockmann may have better detail on it.

Thanks Paul  - no detail to add from my end, other than to say that such locations are saved in the user settings file (c:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\Roaming\SDL\SDL Trados Studio\Studio16\UserSettings.xml) such as the RecentDocumentsList and there is also an element called <SettingsGroup Id="Sdl.TranslationStudio.Common.CommonPaths"> which might be interesting to look at. Thanks, Daniel

If you want to use Studio for managing files and folders, you will need to have as many project templates as many customers you have or otherwise you must name each project with a unique number to have a full control on what is where. For me completely unpractical with over 200 customers in the list and some 20 which whom I work on regular basis.

Every single project management software will create separate folders for separate customers, which in my opinion is the best way to work. Managing files and folders is simply very essential for a translator job, even though many newbies simply store everything on the cloud. A huge number of problems people have with Studio is the result of a completely screwed up files and folders management.

Thanks Jerzy Czopik.  I was only giving an example, but out of interest how do you manage that when working with Studio then?  Do you just change the path manually each time you create a project?  Or do you create your projects with another project management tool using the API for Studio?

I do indeed adapt the path manually during each project creation. This is the only way to manage projects for me. In certain situations, when I have to deal with several packages from the same customer, I create receive the packages in separate folders, created for each job by TranslationOffice 3000, and then create a common project for all the packages. In Studio project I add subfolders for these packages. This way I can profit from cross file repetitions and internal fuzzy matches not only in one customer project, but in all of those.

If you organize your files and folders in a decent way, this works like a charm. And you can show the ISO auditor all what he wants. Quick, simple and efficient.

Paul
Daniel Brockmann

Thank you for the answers. I can see now, that all the default locations are stored in "UserSettings.xml" under CommonPaths:

As you can see, the paths are all different because I work in a team of 10 other people and we share projects.
Over time the paths get really confusing and at least now I know I can just delete these to reset the paths.

>A huge number of problems people have with Studio is the result of a completely screwed up files and folders management.

Totally agreed. One thing I see often is people do not check the entire path when they import a package or create a project and then later they cannot find the data because they don't remember where they saved it. That is why I would prefer if Studio let you specify default paths and not change the paths based on your "Most Recent".

Jesse Good Well, this is what Studio does, if you use project templates as shown by Paul. Having a separate project template for each customer and using an unique project number would let you to have a kind of default, working like this:

d:\projects\customer A\subsequent project number
d:\projects\customer B\subsequent project number

To have this, you need two project templates. One with the path d:\projects\customer A and the other with the path d:\projects\customer B

In addition to the comment from Jerzy on using templates it's worth noting that your problem mainly stems from using a single user application for projects created by a team.  If you used packages this would not be a problem as each user would have their own settings, and it you used GroupShare or Trados Live Team this probably wouldn't be a problem either.

Templates won't cover everything, but not sharing something that is designed for a single user would go a long way towards resolving the issue.

Having said that... I like the idea of default locations for more resources/actions.  Project templates won't resolve everything in your list.

Paul

Dear Paul

Default locations might be something good, if they would be connected to a project management system. Or if Studio would replace a PM system completely. Otherwise it is better to let the user decide, where the files have to go. My 2 cents