ClearCase Snapshot View

[Dorian Workman]

We are using ClearCase for version control, and it is working fine with a Dynamic View for users on the LAN.  However we have a team member who works remotely via WAN, and the Dynamic View remote performance is unacceptable.

So we have set her up with a Snapshot View, but it is doing some strange things.  Does anyone know if using a Snapshot view is recommended / not recommended?  Anyone have any suggestions as to how to setup remote access with ClearCase?

Thanks.

[cbsanders]

Have you resolved your issues with the snapshot view?  What type of strange behavior were you seeing?  We are also considering using ClearCase for version control but I have not figured out yet a solution for our non-LAN users.  With ClearCase, if your WAN connection is very slow, even a snapshot view will not perform well.  It may be usable sometimes and at other times it may time out.  For remote ClearCase development, we utilize the ClearCase Remote Client.  This performs very well over the WAN but I don't believe it is an option with EA.  You cannot operate on a remote client view using the regular ClearCase client command line APIs and if you tell EA that you are using ClearCase, it will not recognize your remote client view as a valid ClearCase view.   They have just released a command line for the remote client for ClearCase version 7.1, but we have not upgraded yet so I can't speak as to whether or not that will allow EA to integrate with a remote client ClearCase view.

[Oliver F.]

Using ClearCase with EA is a mess if you are operating on multisite environments. Either you have one repository on a single server (which performs acceptable inhouse but is a different story over WAN) or you are using a replication server on the remote side and here the problems start. If both sides need write access then you have to transfer masterships between both servers which takes some time.
The other option seems to be to work with streams and UCM instead of a Base ClearCase repository which requires merging afterwards- unacceptable for XMI based data.

Additionally we have not found out how to visualise that a package has already been checked out.

We did not consider the snapshot view as it kills the possibility of dynamically providing the view on all information in the repository.

Actually based on the experiences I made I would not recommend using ClearCase with EA if another option is available. However often there is not much of a choice.

Oliver

[Dorian Workman]

The odd behavior we were seeing was specifically related to selecting 'Get Latest' on a package in the EA GUI, for a user with a snapshot view.  EA was overwriting packages checked out to *other users* (who had dynamic views) with the last checked in version, thereby deleting those users' changes.

We got around it by having the snapshot view user do the Get Latest using ClearCase Explorer directly on the View.  This works fine.

So now we're all good actually.  We're definitely looking forward to 7.5's apparent speed improvements over the WAN, too.