I rolled out a perspective project for several clients which is now being used on daily basis.
Now I am facing the challenge that there has been a good idea for a change which I know how to implement. But the changes won't be done within an hour and it might be needed that I would need to continue on the next day. But all changes would be pushed out as soon as I save the project, wont they?
So I am wondering if I am missing a feature which would allow me to finish the whole change before having it activated with the users.
While this requires a bit of a re-architecture, the way I recommend doing something like this is to make your main project inheritable (this won't allow you to launch it anymore). Then make 2 inherited projects off of it. One is production and the other development. Your clients now use the production project. You can work on the development project all you want except anything gateway related (ie anything related to writing to tags, creating tags, deleting tags, etc). So you can update screens/windows/views, create templates, etc. When done, do an export of the resources and instead of exporting to a file, send them to the parent project which will update the production automatically. Once this is done, you can remove the overrides on the development project resources and since they all exist in the parent, nothing really changes on the development project, then you can use it the next time you need to make changes.
So, that means that I will need to create a new Project in a setup like you propsed and then export the old project to the new one? I can not edit those settings in a already existing project, can I ?
You can change an existing project to be inheritable, but you'll also need to create the child production project off of it and change all clients to launch the production project instead (inheritable projects can't be launched/ran).
I actually created the new parent project and the dev child, then exported my current project to the parent and then set the current project as a child of the newly created one. Worked well and I did not have to update the clients.
Depending on the project it sometimes works fine to make a copy of the current one and use that one for development. When you are done you delete the stable version and rename the "copy_of"-project to the correct name.