Rational Rhapsody Tip #45 - Making safe use of the ReferenceUnitFile property (Advanced)

This video covers use of the General::Model::ReferenceUnitPath property (using IBM Rational Rhapsody v8.3.1). This property tells Rhapsody to set a relative reference to the unit file whenever you do Add to model. This is particularly useful when you have multiple components in an SCM tool such as Rhapsody Model Manager (Jazz/am 6.0.6 is shown here). This is because different users will have different root folders on their local file system where they will store and access the projects. Not using relative references would result in lots of "cannot find unit" problems when opening projects. By setting the ReferenceUnitPath property you can alleviate these problems (assuming all the components share the same roots).

However, there is one major pitfall, in that the property will also affect Profiles that you add after setting it. Referencing the profiles using relative references is also a bad idea because profiles are not relative to the project, but rather contained in the installation. Rhapsody normally deals with profiles in the installation by pre-fixing the path to the unit using the $OMROOT variable. Fortunately, if you accidentally end up with the paths being wrong then you can use the Edit Unit dialog to manually fix them (as shown here). This video shows Rhapsody 8.3.1 projects with corresponding components being created using Rhapsody Model Manager 6.0.6.