MPLAB X Harmoney Framework - Lessons Learned

I will not say I am an expert on the Harmony Framework, but I have been using it for about a year now.  All of my experience is on version 2.06.  A couple of things I  have learned.

Copying a Project

Using the project copy feature in MPLAB X seems to be problematic.  I think I am using the standard (default) directory structure, I don't change anything when I created the Harmony project.

Not all of the source code seems to copy over and launching Harmony results in a not valid Harmony project message.  In the end I manually copied it over into a new directory and that seemed to work.  Now I always place files in the project using the relative reference method.  Something left over from the early days of MPLAB.  As added insurance, I renamed the original directory.  That way if any files were absolute referenced, then project would not compile and they would be identified.

Adding Features

My development philosophy is incremental for a software development project like Brick Controller 2.  That is  I get the basics of one feature, BSP, HID, RTCC, MicroSD, etc working and then integrate this into the bigger project.  This way I am not fighting both the feature and how it interacts with the bigger project.  I have found over the years that this is much easier and is, in most cases, how Agile development works. 

This is the approach I took with the Brick Controller 2.  What I discovered was that the Harmony Framework does not like it when you modify code or source files it generates.  In some cases it was trying to replace previous code or code that I placed with new code.  Needless to say, I selected "approve all changes" mode.  While this prevented overwrites of existing code that was needed, it would also prevent me from included new code.  There did not appear to be a way to copy the new segments onto the clipboard or anywhere else for later insertion.  This would lead to missing code and compile time failures.

My solution was to create a new project for every new feature.  This eliminated the code over writes.  It also had the added benefit of testing the feature in a standalone mode, before integration into the larger product.  You will have to go through all of the files in the directory "src" above and copy the relevant parts to the same file in the main project directory.  This does take a little time, but one big upside is that you are exposed to most of the generated code.  Once all of the code is transferred, you can compile and solve the inevitable integration issues.