Today, we updated rBuilder Online with a non-service-interrupting update that fixes an important bug. Previously, using the new flex-based UI, if you had defined your own group manually by editing a group recipe and then tried to use the web interface to manage the contents of your appliance, rBuilder would overwrite your group recipe file with an essentially blank template, and then you could use the UI to re-populate the group. Now, instead of overwriting the group recipe, rBuilder will disable the UI components for adding packages to the group.

If the flex UI does not allow you to add packages, and you have an older group built with the group-appliance superclass and implementing the addPackages() method, you can enable adding packages in the flex UI with the following steps. (Note that these steps are specific to the rPath Linux 2 platform; if you need to apply these steps on another platform and are unsure how, please feel free to file an issue in the Bugs component.)

1. If the file appliance-manifest.xml does not exist, create and add it with the contents (modified for your appliance):
   

   <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
   <manifest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.rpath.org/permanent/appmanifest-1.0.xsd appmanifest-1.0.xsd">
     <troveName>group-YOURAPPLIANCENAMEHERE-appliance</troveName>
     <troveVersion>1</troveVersion>
     <searchPaths>
       <searchPath>group-os=conary.rpath.com@rpl:2</searchPath>
       <searchPath>group-rapa=raa.rpath.org@rpath:rapa-3</searchPath>
     </searchPaths>
     <explicitTroves/>
     <implicitTroves/>
   </manifest>
   

2. Change your recipe to derive from FactoryRecipeClass if it does not do so already.
3. Change any definition of the addPackages() method to addRecipePackages()
4. Run the command cvc factory factory-group-base=conary.rpath.com@rpl:2 if the recipe did not already derive from FactoryRecipeClass.
5. Check in your changes with cvc commit

If you have a group that rBuilder Online replaced with an empty group in the past few weeks before we fixed this issue, it is possible to merge the contents of your pre-existing group by checking out the previous version of your group and copying the group recipe to a current checkout, and then following the simple conversion steps above. This will work only if you were already using the group-appliance superclass and defining the addPackages() method. If you instead define the setup()> method, conversion requires more work; please see the migration guide for more detailed information on the process. (Be aware that the migration guide was written for rBuilder Appliance rather than rBuilder Online, so some of the description involves a local installation of rBuilder Appliance. This is not important to the migration process.)