Project name news

Question

It appears that Paratext 9.1 is permitting a user to have two projects with the same short name on his or her computer in some cases. For instance, you can have a local project or a project shared with you, and a resource with the same short name, Paratext 9.1 will let you open either one or both together and keeps them separate. And you can have a shared project and a local project with the same short name and it can open both and keep them separate. But in some cases, the project subfolder won’t be where you expect it.

Case 1: local project and resource with the same short name. To do this, you have to create the local project first, then download the resource. If you download the resource then attempt to create the local project, Paratext will complain that you already have a project with the same short name. If you do this in the right order, the local project folder will be where you would expect it, and the resource will be in the _Resource subfolder.

Case 2: local project and project shared with you. As in case 1, you need to create the local project first, then receive the shared project. Paratext 9.1 stores this shared project in a new location, inside a subfolder “_projectsbyid”. And the project subfolder name will be the short name, followed by a period, then the digital ID for the project.

Case 3: resource and project shared with you. In this case the order of getting the projects does not matter, although it will effect the location of the shared project folder. If you receive the shared project before downloading the resource, the shared project is put in a subfolder named after the short name, as usual. If you download the resource first, when you receive the shared project, it will be stored in “_projectsbyid” and the subfolder name will include the project ID as in case 2.

Paratext 8 will not be able to see or open both projects on your computer in any of these cases. It will not detect any project in the “_projectsbyid” subfolder, and when a resource and local project share the same name, it will just see the local project.

It is not possible to have two shared projects with the same name shared with the same user, the registry will reject adding the user to a shared project if that user is already a member of a shared project with the same name.