Accessing Projects and Items

StarTeam can search or open URL shortcut links to projects, views, folders, and items (files, change requests, requirements, tasks, and topics). By creating shortcuts, you can easily and quickly access specific items in a project.

Desktop Shortcuts
If you will be accessing a project view frequently, you may want to save the view as a shortcut on your desktop. Double-clicking the shortcut both starts the application and opens the view associated with the shortcut. You can also create desktop shortcuts to items that you are tracking. Opening the shortcut starts the application, opens the project view in the configuration it had when the shortcut was created, and displays the item’s Properties dialog box.
URL Shortcuts
You can create URLs and HTML representations for items and copy them to the Microsoft Windows Clipboard. Depending on the application, a paste operation transfers either the URL or HTML data to the application. For example, you can copy the names of a list of files to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using the HTML representation. You can email the URLs for a list of files to a coworker to use in StarTeam, as long as your email application does not convert the paste operation to HTML. Not all applications support pasting the HTML representation, although Word, Excel, and Outlook do support HTML data.

Like other URLs, StarTeam URLs include the name of the server for the connection. In some organizations, StarTeam servers may be reached from both the Internet and the corporate intranet. In such cases, a server may have two different IP addresses. If you configure the server list to reference a server by its IP address, rather than its DNS name, then any URLs generated by the client will work only from the network on which that IP address exists.

The type of URL that your StarTeam client creates for an item is set, per item, on their respective tabs in the Personal Options dialog box. There is one exception to this. Because there is no way to set the URL type for a folder, folders always use the ID-based URL type. Also from the Personal Options dialog box, you specify the templates used to create an item’s HTML representation. For projects, views, and folders there is no HTML representation.

  • If the URL is a reference to a project, the default view of the project opens.
  • If the URL is a reference to a view or folder, then the view or folder opens.
  • If the URL is a reference to an item, the item's view opens, the item's parent folder is selected in the folder tree, the item type is selected, and the item itself is selected in the item list or tree on the upper pane.

The URL can be ID-based or name-based. ID-based is the initial default for each item type. The sample URLs below show the basic differences between ID-based and named-based URLs. They both represent a file in that root view of a project. The ID-based URL is the first of the two. 

starteam://hostname:49201/12;ns=Project;scheme=id/ 154;ns=View;scheme=id/869958;ns=File;scheme=id;scope=full; 
starteam://hostname:49201/myproject/myview/path to myfile;scope full;

The advantage of using the ID-based URL is that an item can be moved to a different folder (or a file’s name can be changed) and the item can still be located. The advantage of a name-based URL is that the URL can resolve to different StarTeam objects at different points in time. For example, if a file is deleted and then added again (with a new ID), it can still be located.

StarTeam Visual Studio Plugin Shortcuts
In addition to using process items, you can use the embedded client to create shortcuts to folders, files, change requests, requirements, tasks, and topics. Additionally, you can create shortcuts from Borland Search results. The shortcuts display in the Visual Studio Task List window and you can associate them with items that you are checking in to StarTeam.
Note: You can open the embedded client without a solution being open, however, shortcuts created without an open solution are not saved.

The integration sets the Microsoft Visual Studio Task List to automatically display StarTeam shortcuts. This setting is essential to view any of the item or folder shortcuts that you create for your solutions.

Parent topic: Tour of the UI