Working with Builder Archives
Under the Archives node () you find your compiled archives. You can add and remove archives manually from this list, but a compilation always adds the compiled archive. This list has several purposes: exporting archive as a plug-in, recompiling archives, and open the source files for editing. Once you have compiled the development files to a new archive, you should work with the source builder files in that archive, which are copies of the ones that you added to the development files. You find them under the Source Builder Files folder under the archive node. You can right-click any file under the Source Builder Files node and click Open Selected to edit the file.
Right-click the archive node and choose Compile Archive to recompile the entire archive. This replaces all builder files under the Compiled Builder Files, adds new or replaces existing icons, and updates the language files as described in the previous section. To compile an individual file in an archive, right-click the node of that file and choose Compile File. Compiling individual files is a bit limited and sometimes it is necessary to do a full compilation of the archive to update everything properly. Here is a list of changes that require a full update:
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Adding a new Physics Interface node.
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Adding a new file that other files link to through the External Resources branch.
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Changing icons of a physics interface, adding or changing menus and menu items of a physics interface, and other changes that alters the plugin.xml of the archive.
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To fully update the language resources for translation.
The two latter issues are often not required to do simple testing of the functionality of the physics interface, so it is probably safe to compile a single file although you might not see the correct icon, for example.
Choose the option Compact Archive to reduce the file size of the builder files in the archive by removing unnecessary data. Note that this operation does change the files under the Source Builder Files node. A compacted file always undergoes a compact operation before future save operations. To turn this off, open the file and select the root node of the file. In the Physics Builder section of the Root window, clear the Compact file during save check box.
Compare the entire archive against an SVN repository by choosing Compare with Repository. A Connect to SVN Repository dialog box appears where you fill in the connection settings. In the URL field you enter the location in the SVN repository that contains the checked in archive (folder) with the same name as the selected archive. Also fill in the user credentials in the Username and Password fields. You can perform other comparisons between builder files in the Archive Browser:
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Select two archive nodes, right-click and choose Compare Archives.
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Select two builder file nodes from the Development Files node or from a Source Builder File node of an archive. Then right-click and choose Compare Selected Files.
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If there is an open builder file on the desktop, select one builder file, right-click and choose Compare with Open Physics. This compares the open file (local) with the selected file (remote).
COMSOL displays the result of the comparison in the Comparison section. A comparison displays the differences between a local file and a remote file. When comparing archives there are several such pairs of local files and remote files. The Comparison section contains a tree whose top nodes correspond to such a pair. The icon of the node tells if the files in a pair are equal () or not (). Expand the node to browse the differences between two files. For each selected node, you can view its attributes in the table below the tree, and the bottom table displays the currently selected pair of local and remote file.
You use the option Export As Plug-in to export the archive to a compressed archive (*.jar), when you want to include it into a COMSOL installation. The next step is to copy the compressed archive into the plugins folder of the COMSOL installation. To use the Run in Web Browser feature of the Application Builder for applications that use a physics interface created using the Physics Builder, the plug-ins also have to be placed in the web/plugins directory. Finally, you have to restart COMSOL before you can use the new plug-in.
In some system environments, the COMSOL installation folder can be write protected for ordinary users, so you cannot put the exported plug-in there without contacting the system administrator. There is an alternative location where you can put your compiled plug-ins. In your user home folder, COMSOL always creates a .comsol folder. Under this folder the alternative location is <version>/archives, where you replace <version> with the current version of COMSOL. The alternative folder named archives may not exist, and you must then create it first. Any compressed archive (with extension .jar) is loaded into COMSOL next time it starts.
To allow the physics interface to be used in applications running on COMSOL Server (see the COMSOL Server Manual), the compiled plug-ins should be placed in the server/plugins and web/plugins directories of the COMSOL Server installation directory, or in <version>server/archives (for example, v55server/archives).