Clone an entire project (all entities)

[JulianaGuerra]

Hello! 

My team and I would like to clone/duplicate an entire project (including its dependencies) and simply change the entities' names. For example, the original project would be ProjectEx1 and we want another version called ProjectEx2.  We know that we can use Clone snippet on Services but it only allows us to clone Things, Users, Notifications, and Thing Templates, which is not enough for a whole project. We would also need Data Shapes, State Definitions, Media, etc. 

Is there any way to do this cloning process autonomous by a service or do I have to Duplicate each entity one by one?  

Thank you in advance. 

Juliana 

[TonyZhang]

Hi @JulianaGuerra,

May I know what the use case is for duplicating all TWX entities in an project?

If you want to backup the projects you created, you can use ThingWorx built-in export functionality to export all the entities and data belong to a project.

Alternatively, you can use solution central to package your solution and publish to Solution Central so that you can deploy to any instances later if needed.

https://support.ptc.com/help/thingworx/solution_central/en/#page/solution_central/package_sc.html

[JulianaGuerra]

Hi @TonyZhang ,

The use case is an exercise for new trainees on the team. So we want to keep a project as a "template" and then create copies with different names for each person in our dev environment. 

I appreciate your solution however this being the case: not for backup, we would really need to copy every entity into a new project.

However, if you have more ideas, please share. Thank you.

[TonyZhang]

Hi @JulianaGuerra,

Oh I see, it's for training purpose. Then I'm afraid there's no OOTB function in Thingworx can duplicate all entities in a project.

Please post you idea and use case in below site.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/ThingWorx-Ideas/idb-p/thingworxideas

As a workaround, I'd suggest you to try using ThingWorx Docker, with an image created, you can easily reproduce many ThingWorx instances from the image (yml file) on a fly.

See below Help Portal for more information on ThingWorx Docker 

https://support.ptc.com/help/thingworx/platform/r9/en/index.html#page/ThingWorx/Help/Installation/ThingWorxDockerGuide/thingworx_docker_landing_page.html

So that you can assign each trainee with a separate ThingWorx instance - publish your project to Solution Central and deploy your project to every instance running on Docker - You get many duplicate training environment ready.

[JulianaGuerra · Accepted solution]

Hi @TonyZhang,

Thank you so much for all your suggestions. I'll definitely post this idea there for feature reference. 

The yml file is a great workaround but for now, we'd like to keep all trainees on the same instance.

The simplest workaround we've found is to export the project (including dependents) in .xml, open the file and select to replace all entity's names for the new ones. Not ideal. 

Thank you once again. 

Kind regards.