Long timeouts on invalid script projects

Stephen Brown

I have a project containing a scripts folder which is on a virtual machine that is not currently running. When I open SQL Compare, there is a wait of several minutes before the projects show and this scripting project shows as folder not found. To delete the project, I select the project which then takes several more minutes wait. I then select delete which takes a further more several minutes. In all, it took about 15 minutes just to select and delete a project.

Is there a way to stop the project list from validating all of the scripts folders? I'd rather have these projects in my list and use them as needed.

Michelle T

There isn't an option to directly turn off validation of the folder paths. However, what you could do is split your projects into different directories, one which contains the projects which refer to the virtual machine and one of which contains the other projects, and then switch between the directories using the drop-down at the top of the project selection dialog.

Currently we're unlikely to implement an option that turns off folder path validation in the project selection dialog, but I've put it in the database - if other people are having this problem too, we'll look into adding an application option for it. Would that solve your problem if we implemented such an option?

Stephen Brown

I don't understand what you mean by splitting the projects up. There is a single project list and it gets loaded the moment SQL Compare is started, so just launching SQL Compare causes the timeout issues as it immediately starts validating all the projects.

The issue isn't with the validation, the fact that the validation occurs on the project page and the fact that the validation can take several minutes to timeout causes it to be unusable for paths that may not be present at all times. If either of these conditions was changed, it would fix this bug.

My condition this week was that I needed to script a new project, but couldn't do so without waiting a few minutes for SQL Compare to load as it timed out on the project paths. I then simply wanted to delete the nonexistent projects and it took about 15 minutes of waiting for timeouts (timeout on load, timeout when the project line was selected, timeout when clicked "delete" which for some reason reloaded the project list and caused another timeout) to simply click the delete button.

Michelle T

Do you have SQL Compare 6 or higher? In SQL Compare 6 we put in a dropdown and file browser at the top of the Comparison Projects dialog so you could choose what folder to save your projects in, which would let you have projects saved in two different folders and switch between them, only switching to the one with the virtual machine projects in when you had the virtual machine up.

Stephen Brown

Understood, I see this in SQL Compare 6 and was just using the default folder.

This is a workaround, but it will still be a major issue with any project list containing an unavailable script folder. The timeout should only be a few seconds to determine the folder is unavailable. If the timeout cannot be limited, there should at least be a status showing you what it is happening and give the ability to cancel while it is verifying instead of hanging the application for several minutes without any indication of what is going on.