http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

GIT looks interesting. Has anyone used it? Any thoughts?

I'm not sure whether it would be beneficial to Rhapsody but I liked the idea that the Merging concept was the most important.

Of course Rhapsody's DiffMerge tool has improved significantly over the past few releases but how much do people use it? Personally I try to organise the team such that individuals don't overlap during their modeling. This is difficult to do but mostly worth the effort because I find it forces a better architecture.

What are your experiences with team-working in Rhapsody, CM etc?

I'm using SVN with Rhapsody now. It's quite good so far. Anyone else using it? I'm using the PushOK SCC plug-in.

I'm embarrassed to say what CM tool we're using, but I've recently needed to make a small utility to help us identify changes. The idea is to read the repository and identify all versions of all changed files in which a particular change number was referenced on check-in. Given that data, one can then run DiffMerge to view the changes between selected versions of a file (where the file is a Rhapsody unit), or run Word compare if the file was a Word doc (i.e. a controlled file in the model). DiffMerge is fairly handy for view differences, though I haven't yet worked out how to make it start in the "View diff" mode rather than "View all".

I use Rhapsody with ClearCase. I use the SCC interface to ClearCase, but only to get the CM status icons in the model browser. I've integrated Rhapsody DiffMerge with ClearCase as described in the Team Collaboration manual and that works pretty well.

- Sparky

Yes, I've use Rhapsody with ClearCase on a previous project and concur with the positive view of the integration. (Alas, current tool is a step backwards.)

When you view differences in DiffMerge from ClearCase, does it start up with View --> View all checked or View --> View diff checked?

If the latter, how do you get it to do that?

Hi Farquhar:
We have a setup with Windows XP, TortoiseSVN as CM and so far we have not been able to succesfully do a merge with Rhapsody's DiffMerge tool.
- Is there any special setting you did on Rhapsody or Subversion to make it work?
The problem we have seen is that even when we know there are changes, the DiffMerge tool does not "see" them. When we were in Linux-ClearCase it worked just fine.

Any guidance will be appreciated.

I'm not at work to currently try things out but I'm interested as to how your merge gets initiated. Is it manually started or on detection of a conflict?

Have you changed the tortoise settings to use the DiffMerge.exe dependent on file extension?

Hi Farquhar.

Should DiffMerge be used to merge individual .sbs and .omd files or is it best to run DiffMerge on the <filename>.rpy file in the recursive mode?

The Subversion SCMS provides individual file references for theirs, mine, base and output to be used by an external merge tool. If we don't use DiffMerge to process individual files, but just run it on the .rpy file, is there a good way to make the other model files available to DiffMerge?

Do we need to copy the files from subversion into local directories?

Thanks
Marcos

Hi mteres,

I have setup diff merge to be called when there is a conflict on the SBS file. That works for me.

To get the DiffMerge tool to fire up when sbs files are selected for use by Tortoise (so from within explorer, rather than using Rhapsody's Configuration Management menus) I did the following:
1. Right click in explorer, then select the context menu for TortoiseSVN:
TortoiseSVN->Settings.
2. from the Category tree on the left of the settings dialog, select "Diff Viewer", underneatht hte External Programs node.
3. click the Advanced... button on the right hand side of the dialg
4. click "Add..." to provide a new specific program for a given extension.
5. give ".sbs" for the extension / mime-type, and the full path to DiffMerge.exe for the external program.
6. 3 OK clicks, and you're done.

To get a similar effect from with Rhapsody itself, I needed to configure PushOK. I have added a PDF that shows what I did for that, I am not certain I have the optimum configuration, but it seems to work.

There still seems to be glitches on my set up surrounding the behaviour of PushOK if there are two (or more, I guess) conflicting files to be resolved as a result of a single step. - sometimes it seems as though Rhapsody has hung waiting for PushOK to complete.

Let us know how you get on.

colski

We are using clearcase for our CM in batch mode. We only use DiffMerge when we need to perform a diff on two items, never use it for merges. Since it is unable to diff state diagrams, and we use state diagrams we don't even bother trying to merge anything with it. We are going to have to figure out how eventually though.

What do you mean by "it is unable to diff state diagrams"?

The merge works best when you provide a base. It is a very powerful tool when used this way and has been proven to work in challenging environments such as mobile comms projects. If you are struggling then it's best to ask for some advice.

Confirming this, I would note that we have recently had to apply changes to both a branch and a mainline version of an sbs file containing classes including attributes, operations, state charts, etc. My experience is that, having applied the changes once (typically in the branch), doing the same to the mainline is quite quick using base-aware merging. OMD layouts usually need some manual adjustment, but copy-paste from one side to the merge is fairly effective. Textual changes, e.g. to operation bodies, types, properties, etc, are very easy. The only time it became more difficult was due to my own stupidity when I had renamed some states in the branch but not in the mainline: more manual adjustment was needed in that case, but it was still worth using DiffMerge.