Version Control without problems??

[doctor_uv]

We are using subversion to version control a growing UML model of a 3 tier web application.
We are a team of up to 8 geographically distributed team members trying to collaborate with the subversion repository.
But we keep on loosing diagram contents.

After Sparx confirmed a limitation with sequence diagrams, we switched to robustness diagrams but still have problems loosing diagram content after a number of checkins...
Is there anyone who has no problems with version control?

[thomaskilian]

Not yet, but keen to know if there are more!

[Martin Terreni]

We don't have, but we work with TFS. I don't remember also having any serious problems with ClerCase (though I remember it had some annoying issues some times...)

[liquidray]

Could you comment on what type of issues you saw with Clear Case. We are looking to integrate our EA model with Clear Case and I am wondering what issues we would encounter and also what that integration buys us. We are particularly interest in versioning of standalone elements such as use cases and external requirements as well as various diagrams.
Thank you!

[Martin Terreni]

It was long a go (still with EA4.5) but as I remember the main problems we had were caused by the fact that CC was on linux and EA on windows. We had them connected through SAMBA creating a virtual drive in the windows machine over a view in CC. One of the main problems was that EA was not able to open EAP files saved in the view, only on windows machines. This forced us to keep the EAP in a windows machine and the XMI seperately in views in CC. Also the merging of files through EA was rather slow and sometimes problematic (becuase of the same reasons).
All in all I don't think you should give up EA if you move to CC, both of them are grate tools, you just have to be ready for some implementation time till you learn how to work arround the little things there.

I'm now working with TFS becuse this is my company policy, but I would surely choose CC if I could (and keep EA).

Good luck

[doctor_uv]

Hello,

this thread turned into a discussion of which version control system to use. From the posts it seems that the bridge into the version control is generally working correctly for all systems. Thats Great!

However, the reason to start this thread was about how to deal with the loss of references to elements in other parts of the model located in different XMI files within the version controlled repository.

For a single user scenario this does not seem to be a problem. However, the collaboration between a number of private EA projects (team of 5) synchronized with version control there seem to be a problem.

I also remember that a GetAllLatest action produces some status messages about resolving and updating references within the repository ......  This sounds like an indication where the problem might be coming from.

Generally, there seems to be an unresolved problem and I wonder if anyone came up with a workaround or an approach how to baseline the UML model so this does not happen anymore.

Maybe this style of collaboration requires to align the private EAP project files in a regular fashion.

Thanks for your input

[sricaldoni]

Hi. I had the same problem and it was related with the encoding of the files uploaded and downloaded to and from the repository. For instance. Alice uploads and work with UTF-8 while Bob works with windows-1252. It is quite probable to have inconsistencies within this context. At a first glance it seems that sequence diagrams looses references to objects but if you check the XMI file then you will see that the references to those objects are still there.
What I suggest is to configure both, Alice's and Bob's Enterprise Architect instance to work with UTF-8.
Menu -> Tools -> Options (Shortkey: CTRL+F9) and in 'XML Specifications' set the code page to UTF-8.
In order to be coherent with your new encoding policy, in the same dialog box select 'Source Code Engineering' and set the 'code page for source editing' value to UTF-8.

I hope this fixes up your problems.

Regards,
Sebastian