Hello,
Pattern tools include an efficient way to manage patterns and instances updates through the “manage instances” panel . When you update a pattern, its version is then automatically incremented.
But my question is : is there a way to go back to a previous version of a pattern ? If not, is it only possible to track the modifications made between different versions of a pattern ? It would be very useful for versioning.
Kind regards,
Pierre
Hello Pierre,
There is no “built-in” support for versioning at the granularity of a pattern; pattern versions only aim at identifying probable unsynchronized instances.
The idea, rather, is to proceed with pattern catalogs the same way you proceed with Capella models, since a pattern catalog is a model too.
So for example you may use EGit and the EGit/Capella integration plug-in to track the history of a pattern catalog and see its modifications. That requires a specific preferences to be set beforehand: in Window -> Preferences -> Content Types -> Text -> XML -> XML Metadata Interchange (XMI), the value ‘*.patterns’ must be added.
The limitation is that comparisons are represented at a rather technical level: there is no support for, e.g., comparing the image of two patterns in two different versions, and a number of irrelevant technical differences related to layout/graphical concerns are mixed with differences about the semantic elements that are added/removed/updated in the pattern. This could be improved: a predefined filter would help a lot. Still, you may manually ignore technical differences before focusing on the relevant ones.
I would add snapshots to illustrate this explanation, but my browser seems to be in a bad mood today…
Best regards,
Olivier
Hello Olivier and thank you for your useful answer.
We are currently using SVN to manage model versioning, so I assume that it should work in a similar way.
Also I think that the limitations you’re talking about are pretty acceptable, as the main idea would be to keep track of the differences between patterns as a precaution.
Regards,
Pierre