Manage Versions

Without a strong versioning methodology, it is near impossible to establish good control and organization when making data changes. The concept of a version plays a crucial role in bringing together all the parties involved in a change. A version, by definition, is a vector of communication between the teams involved in the change process.

THE SOLUTION

In ARCAD's methodology, a change process begins by opening a set of modifications identified by a version number. When this batch is transferred to production, the application is considered to be at this new version level. If you plan to make a number of critical data changes simultaneously and deploy them to production in different phases, we suggest to set up  version libraries. These libraries, associated with each version, contain the database required to make your critical data modifications. Thanks to this architecture, you can make concurrent changes to data easily and independently of each other. Any conflicts can be resolved using ARCAD’s data compare functions.

Allocating a DCM data type component (checkout):

Once a version has been opened, you will need to associate your DCM Data type components with it. They can be associated manually through a checkout. This action will result in copying the corresponding data into the target environment. However, in most situations, data modifications are made directly in the test environment using the existing application. In this case, the process of associating the corresponding DCM data type components will be done automatically as changes are made. Attaching modifications to a version number is possible through an advance initialization performed by the user. If the user wishes to “dispatch” the changes to several different versions, he only needs to change the initialization.

What happens in the event of a conflict? If you have decided that a checkout should be exclusive in your organization, a critical data change can be blocked by ARCAD-Datachanger. When a data type component is made up of a group of data with different origins, a modification to any of the values will lead to the allocation (checkout) of the corresponding DCM data type component.

Other Functions on CDM Data Type Components:

Other functions supported by the CDM module are:

• Copying deleted components (only effective at the time of version transfer to production),
• “Undo” a modification in progress, this restores the previous data image.
• Certain functions such as “display,” “print,” and “rename” are not available since they are intended to be an integral part of your application.

Linking Maintenance reports:

To complete the traceability of your change process, you can implement the ARCAD maintenance Report system. Those maintenance reports can themselves be linked to user requests (see the Request Tracking page for more information). A Maintenance Report plays a major role in the ARCAD methodology. It creates a single document that is the central point for:

• The technical description of changes made,
• Project management information,
• The list of impacted components (objects or data),
• The list of users who made the change,
• The list of user requests associated with the change

THE ADVANTAGES

This versioning technique ensures:

• Component allocation by a user in a given version (the check-out principle)
• Automatic transfer of support file(s) in a target environment
• Automatic storage of all changes
• User document link