over the last years I had a little side project ongoing. The idea was to have an add-on which allows users to concurrently edit FreeCAD files. It is not yet in a workable state to do that reliable, but I think I'm already quite far when it comes to the back-end. Hence I like some alpha testers to iron out the current state of things before going on. I'm becoming a bit blind of bugs already, hence a fresh set of eyes would be helpful.
The general idea can be seen here:
Questions for brave souls who want to give me some testing help:
1. Can you install it (see instructions below)
2. Does it run on your machine as shown in the video?
3. Can you find FreeCAD workflows, actions, etc. that lead to unsynchronized documents in the multiple open FreeCAD instances? Do the following:
3.1. Setup two FreeCad instances and and make sure both are connected to the network
3.2 Open a document on the first instance and share it.
3.3 In the second instance it will show up as "node" type document, open it there
4.4 In any instance, try a FreeCAD workflow, e.g. PartDesign, Draft, Arch, FEM, Path... whatever you can think of
4.5 On each step check, if the second instance does replicate your action correctly and the documents are the same
4.6 If the documents are not the same, or an error occurred in the report view, try to make a minimal example out of it that fails reproducible
4.7 Get creative in breaking it (except the known issues
)Installation:
1. Add this repository as custom repository to the addon manager (configure menu): https://github.com/OpenCollaborationPla ... borativeFC
2. Restart add-on manager, Install CollaborativeFC
3. Restart FreeCAD
Things known not to work:
1. Links into other documents
2. On Linux with python 3.9 your CPU will go to 100%. There is a problem with an python module, hopefully it gets fixed soon
3. Does not work reliable with different FreeCAD versions. All 0.18 or all 0.19 should work, but not a mix
4. Concurrent editing will fail at the moment. You can work in both FreeCAD instances and it should be mirrored, but if you do it at the same time synchronization is not guaranteed yet. E.g. if one instance has a longrunning update on a model, and the other instance edits stuff during the update, it currently breaks.
5. If you are brave enough to test it over different PCs most likely it will fail quite fast
How it works from the technical site:
1. Everything happens peer to peer, so your data is not uploaded or stored on any server
2. It starts a p2p node in the background, with which the FreeCAD instance communicates. There is one node per PC, hence in the video both FreeCAD instances connect to the same node
3. It stores the FC document data locally and provides synchronization to other nodes which joined the same document (but this is still somewhat yankie)
Site note:
The p2p node does crate a folder called .ocp in your home folder ($HOME in linux) and a config file in your OS default config folder, which must be cleaned manual when you want to fully remove everything afterwards.
Future plans:
1. Create regression tests for all problems found by alpha testers
2. Add the transaction stuff, so that real concurrent editing works
3. Iron out the multi-PC workflow to be stable
Happy testing and thanks for any help and comment!
