FLEx Bridge is an application that allows multiple FieldWorks 8.0 users to do remote collaboration (i.e., not necessarily connected by a local network).

The FLEx Bridge application has merged in the functionality of Lift Bridge, so it now supports Send/Receive for the full FieldWorks data set, as well as smaller set of LIFT dictionary data. FLEx Bridge uses Chorus to do the "heavy lifting" of the collaboration work for both sets of data. Users can collaborate with others using one or both types of data.

Status¶

[Last revision of this page: 12 April 2013]

FLEx Bridge (Windows) has been released in a Beta version along with FieldWorks 8.0 (Beta). FLEx Bridge is installed with FW 8.0, but it has its own installer so it can be updated independently of FW, as needed.

FLEx Bridge (Linux) is built at the same time as its Windows counterpart, but has some known issues working on Linux.

My wife and I (Randy) have been using preliminary versions of FLEx Bridge for nearly three years now, but it lacked a lot for it to be more widely usable. Those lacking areas have mostly been filled in.

Downloads¶

FLEx Bridge can be downloaded here.

Documentation¶

Documentation for FLEx Bridge is available here.

Developers¶

Mailing List¶

Sign up here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/flexbridgedev

Source Code¶

FLEx Bridge is written in C#. The UI widgets uses Windows Forms from the Chorus library.

To get the source code, you'll need Mercurial. Windows users, install TortoiseHg. Then from a command line, go to where you keep your development projects, and give this command:

hg clone http://hg.palaso.org/fwbridge

You should now have a solution which you can build using any 2010 edition of Visual Studio 2010, including the free Express version.

Getting up-to-date libraries¶

Some of the dependencies are very large, and others are updated frequently. For both of those reasons, you can't just pull the code and expect it to compile. First, you will have to do some extra work to get FLEx Bridge's library dependencies up to date.

1) Palaso Libraries

Get binaries of Palaso libraries from http://build.palaso.org/repository/downloadAll/bt32/.lastSuccessful/artifacts.zip. This is really the latest, so don't be disheartened if there's some API change which FLEx Bridge hasn't updated to yet. We keep them in sync generally, but a few times a year they may be out of sync by a day or so.

Using the contents of the zip, update the palaso libraries in lib/Debug and lib/Release.

2) Chorus Libraries

Get binaries of Chorus libraries from http://build.palaso.org/repository/downloadAll/bt2/14146:id/artifacts.zip. This is really the latest, so don't be disheartened if there's some API change which FLEx Bridge hasn't updated to yet. We keep them in sync generally, but a few times a year they may be out of sync by a day or so.

Using the contents of the zip, update the Chorus libraries in lib/Debug and lib/Release.