Add location to Required MDG Technologies

[Uffe]

Hi all,


The Required MDG Technologies feature is useful, but it requires that users have the same MDG Technology paths set up. This is no issue for built-in technologies, but for locally developed ones it can be.

Specifically, if I want to trial a newer version of an MDG Technology I deploy it to a different network share than the "release" one. I would like to be able to set up a project to use my "trial" version instead of the "release" one and simply point my trial team to that project, but I can't do that because the MDGRequire and MDGBlklist (in t_genopt) specify the technologies by ID, not by file name.

So if the location could be added, either by using the technology file's path or by adding a t_genopt option for the MDG search path, I could specify the technology and path in my trial project and everyone would have a smoother EA experience.


As an alternative, of course, if the "MDG Technologies" dialog, as well as the required/disabled technologies option, were made version-aware, that would be even better.

By that I mean that the respective dialogs should list every version of each MDG Technology they find and force the user to choose exactly one of each such group. The technologies would be identified by their IDs, and listed with their version IDs.


Yet another alternative would be to store the technology ID + version ID in t_genopt. That would be good enough, although of course it wouldn't resolve the case where two MDG Technology files have the same technology ID and version ID -- but really that's poor version control on the developer's part.


/Uffe

[Geert Bellekens]

Have you thought of importing the MDG into the model?
Your trial project could then import the trial MDG, and everyone that connect to that model has the correct version of the MDG without having to synchronize paths or anything.

Geert

[Uffe]

That's not really the question. The question is, shouldn't it be possible to specify MDG Technologies with greater accuracy, taking into account file location and/or version?

The fact that the file location doesn't apply to the "import" deployment option is beside the point. The "referenced file" deployment option is supported, and could be improved in the manner suggested.

/Uffe

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Hi Uffe,

We solved this problem by having multiple paths/environments (similar to the concept of Dev, Test, Prod)  MDG developers have paths that point to their local machine. Power users have one common path, general users have a different general path.

The MDG is "promoted" from one location to the other as testing/validation proceeds.

It's, perhaps, less than optimal. But we haven't found too many problems with this approach.  We've found enough problems with trying to switch MDG versions via the dialog that this is the easiest process.  The MDG is just slip-streamed into the appropriate folder and activated the next initialisation.

Paolo