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Working on Projects

A project in XOD groups multiple patches together and forms a single storable/shareable entity.

Usually, you create a XOD project per a real-world project, whatever it means. It could be a digital art installation for some upcoming event, a program to teach students, or a throw-away experiment for one evening. One project may target multiple physical devices if they are parts of a whole.

To be more precise, XOD places no technical restrictions on what a project should contain or not contain. It is purely an organizational object.

How to create a project #

Starting a new project in XOD IDE is as simple as hitting “File → New Project” in the main menu.

A new project starts with a single patch called main, which has no special treatment. You can rename or delete it right away if you’d like to do so.

Saving a project #

XOD stores projects locally on your computer in a file or files. In that sense, it is similar to numerous of other classic applications: You can save, save as, open, move, copy, or delete your project files on your PC or across machines.

A subtle difference from other applications is that although XOD IDE can look like a multi-document editor (you open patches in tabs), the save operation is atomic and stores/updates every part of a project in a single shot. This behavior is necessary to avoid node reference inconsistencies and support the two possible storage flavors described below.

Packed .xodball #

The default option to store a project is saving it as a so-called xodball, a format in which the whole project is dumped to a single file with the .xodball extension.

Once you have a xodball, you can do with it the same things you would do with an office document file: send it to someone via e-mail, put it in Dropbox to share it with another PC, or duplicate it to make a quick backup.

Pro Under the hood, a xodball is a prettily printed JSON document that describes all patches, nodes, links, and other entities contained in the project.

Multifile projects #

The multi-file mode could be more suitable for advanced xoders who want fine-grained control over project files, effective collaboration, and version control with a traditional VCS like Git.

To save a project in multiple files, select that option in the save dialog (Windows, Linux) or omit the .xodball extension while saving (macOS).

Note that multi-file projects are only supported in the desktop version of IDE. The browser-based version always works with xodballs due to a lack of system permissions.

An example outline of a project with two patches saved in multiple files:

/path/to/project-directory
dc-motors	Folder for the patch
patch.xodp	JSON describing the patch
README.md	Detailed description for the node
wiring_motorz.png	Arbitrary media file referred by README.md
servo	Folder for another patch
patch.cpp	C++ implementation for the patch node
patch.xodp	JSON describing the patch
project.xod	Project manifest: name, version, license, etc

Opening a project #

To open a project made by you or downloaded somewhere, hit “File → Open Project” in XOD IDE and point it to the .xodball or project.xod file.

Note You can also double-click the file in your OS file-browser. However, the file associations are only set up when you install the desktop XOD IDE on macOS or Windows system-wide (i.e., to C:\Program Files\).

Unlike many other development systems, when you open a project, XOD tries to resolve any missing dependencies and inconsistencies. This means that to continue a project made by anyone on any machine, it should be enough just to open the project in IDE.

T0D0 In an ideal world, it should work as described. But XOD is not complete yet and so has two flaws that you should eventually note.

If a project is open and references a library that you haven’t installed yet, you’ll see red nodes, links, and dead reference cautions. It will switch back to normal after few seconds when XOD auto installs required libraries from the cloud.
It could happen that a library that the project depends on has introduced some backward-incompatible changes recently, and you’ll be left with some dead references. In that case, you’ll have to downgrade problem libraries manually.