Help Needed: Disappearing data in EA 7.5 and SVN

[Adrian Cook]

Hi folks,

We're encountering a serious issue with disappearing data using EA 7.5 and Subversion for package version control. Here is the setup:

- Package A, under SVN version control, contains two Component elements, X and Y.

- Package B1, which is a sub-package of A but is under seperate SVN version control, contains a Component diagram showing components X and Y and the interfaces that they implement (see below). There are similar packages B2, B3, etc that are also sub-packages of A and are structured the same way.

- Package C1, which is a sub-package of B1 but is under seperate SVN version control, contains Interface elements C1x and C1y, each of which defines a set of operations. Component X implements interface C1x and component Y implements interface C1y via Realization relationships. There is a also a Sequence diagram in the pkg that shows message passing between components X and Y with respect to these particular operations. There are similar packages C2, C3, etc that are also sub-packages of B1 and are structured the same way.

This may seem like an awfully complex package structure but there's a reason for it.

Okay, here's the issue we're having: every now and then, most (but not all) of the operations shown in the Sequence diagrams in the C-level packages will simply disappear from the diagrams, even in packages that remain checked in. This seems to happen after the top-level (A) package has been checked out by someone on the team, even if they have made no changes directly in that package. (EA forces us to check out this package in order to update the Sequence diagrams in the C-level packages, presumably because we are adding operation invocations between the two components defined in that package.) We have also observed the Interface elements disappearing from the Component diagrams in the B-level packages. We're not sure why any of this is happening.

The new issue we ran into today is that the actual operation definitions have disappeared from ALL of the Interface elements in ALL of the C-level packages, despite the fact that those pkgs remain checked in to SVN. (At least it looks like the operations are gone - none are shown in the Project Explorer.) Again this happened after someone checked out the top-level package but did not change anything directly within it.

Anyone have any ideas as to what's going on here? We're totally stumped. This is a very serious issue that we need to resolve asap. We're working in a shared SQL Server-based EA project with a shared SVN repository for the packages under version control (everyone also has their own local copy of the XMI files for the packages under SVN control, as that is the way version control in EA with SVN works).

Any help would be appreciated.

THanks,
Adrian

[Geert Bellekens]

Adrian,

You are experiencing a classic issue with EA and version control.
According to Sparx this should have been fixed completely in v9, so it's worth to test it out.
In pre-v9 versions it often helps to import the xmi's twice to get the missing references back.

Geert

[buddy robbins]

Adrian,
We had the same problem.  Going to V9 was not an option since we had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get V8 approved.

Be aware that the SVN data is good, it's the database that's messed up.  A good quick fix (not 100%, but most of the time) is to check out the package and then un-checkout.  DO NOT Check in or your data is lost and you'll have to revert in SVN.

I built a plugin that you can run against a branch that does a reload recursively.  That way you don't have to spend an hour checking out/uncheckingout all of the packages.

If you find a better way, please post it.  

-Buddy Robbins

[qwerty]

As long as you are working on local EAP files with VC you MUST do a Get All Latest on the project root right after creating the file from out of an EAB. This is because EA does not resolve forward references correctly on finalizing the import. I reported a bug but have no confirmation except they will endeavor. However, when working on a shared model NEVER use Get All Latest (search the forum for the reason).

q.

[Adrian Cook]

The problem of the disappearing operation definitions on our Interface elements is still happening to us, despite the fact that we recently upgraded as a team to EA 8.0 from EA 7.5. (For reasons I won't go into we can't move to EA 9 yet.) This is a really serious issue for us. Of the 52 Interface elements we have defined, the operations have disappeared from all but two of them. Not sure why those two were spared, though they are located in the same package.

I'm not convinced that this problem is related to the issues with inter-package dependencies and version control, since some of the operations that have disappeared did not have any obvious dependencies on data in other packages. (Some of the missing operations have parameters whose types are defined in other packages, while others do not.) Any ideas? THis is really frustrating.

Thanks,
Adrian

[Geert Bellekens]

Adrian,

I know messages and other relations can get removed because version control issues, but I've never heard of operations being lost.
Have you asked Sparx support about that?

Geert