Multiple Profiles and Launching Raven With a Different Profile

One of the features of Raven is to allow you to manage multiple Profiles (in addition to multiple blogs within a Profile). A Raven Profile maintains all posts, tasks, indexes, account information etc. (basically all runtime information) in a single folder. Normally, most people would end up using a single profile. This default profile is normally stored in your Windows Application Data directory (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\Zoundry\Zoundry Raven\<Profile Name>).

Example of cases where you may want to use multiple profiles are:

• More than one user is sharing a single PC desktop. In this case, each user can have a Profile.
• You want to separate your personal blogs from other blogs (e.g. work/business).
• You are a professional writer/contributer and write for multiple clients/customers. In this case, you want to assign each of your clients a separate profile (you do not have to - but it keeps each of the customers/clients data separate).

At Zoundry, we also maintain multiples profiles - one of them being for the this Development Blog (and the Zoundry Blog) and the rest (a lot) being various "test" profiles. For example, some profiles contain 1 blog with a few posts, while others may have multiple blogs across various platforms with 1000s of posts. Another case is where some users have zipped their profile and emailed it to use for tracking down bugs.

Profile Manager:

This is the dialog you normally see on start up. It allows you to select the profile you want to open as well as create and delete Profiles.

Currently, this dialog is shown only during start up. You cannot switch profiles once you have launched the application. If you need to switch profiles, you need to exit the application and restart it. (This issue will be addressed in a later release).

Notice that this dialog has a "Don't show this dialog again" check box. Well, if you do check it, the dialog will not be shown and Raven will always launch with the last used Profile. Currently there is no way (with the current UI) for you to get to this dialog again (this will be resolved as well). If you must see this dialog, then the only option is to exit the application and modify a XML configuration file:

1. Open the profiles.xml file C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\Zoundry\Zoundry Raven\profiles.xml .
2. Change the attribute named "bypass-dialog" (in the <profiles> element) value to "false".
   < profiles default-profile =" Raven Dev Blog " bypass-dialog =" false " >
   ......
   ......

Changing the Profile From The Command Line:

If you are launching Raven from a command line or a Windows shortcut file, you can provide the path to the profile using the "--profile" option. The syntax is:

--profile <full_path_to_profile>

We use this technique in our development environment (Eclipse) to allow us launch different test Profiles from Eclipse's Run menu.

Launching a Profile From The Desktop:

Using the --profile command line option it is possible for one to launch a Profile from a desktop shortcut. For example, I launch the Zoundry Development Blog profile directly from my desktop - bypassing the Profile Manager Dialog with its many profiles (in my case).

1. Create a shortcut to zRaven.exe on your Windows Desktop. The zRaven.exe executable file is normally found in C:\Program Files\Zoundry Raven\bin\ directory. To create a shortcut, right click on the zRaven.exe, drag and drop it to your desktop and choose Create Shortcuts Here option.
   
   
   
2. Next, you need to modify the shortcut's "Target" value by appending --profile and the path to your Profile. To do this, right click on the shortcut and choose the Properties option. From the shortcut's Properties dialog, select the Shortcut tab and append --profile [path-to-profile] to the Target value and press OK to save the changes
   
   
   
   For example, if the Profile is locate in the C:\Blog Profiles\RavenDevBlog directory, then the Target value should look like (not completely visible in the screen shot):
   
   "C:\Program Files\Zoundry Raven\bin\zRaven.exe" --profile "C:\Blog Profiles\RavenDevBlog"
   

Now, when you double click on the desktop shortcut, Raven will launch, bypassing the Profile Manager and using the Profile defined in the command line option.

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Labels: command line options, development, how-to