I've read about Source Control in the Creating Reporting Applications with Developer Studio.

It's clear it works with projects.

I started down the project path - but things didn't appear to be the same in a project as it did in the Content/Repository. I suspect it's many of the startup/config variables that are set in the true webfocus environment.

Anywho - I had a discussion with 3 different IBI people about projects - and no one really talked about them favorably.

I have the impression (quite possibly I am incorrect) - that projects, in general are not used.

I have searched Focal Point - and I did find a few posts - but nothing definitive about versioning.

I am curious: Do you use projects?
I am curious: Do you use some type of versioning system?

I'm looking for a best practice to implement. We recently had an issue where it seemed like Developer Studio just "ate" the HTML on save. Fortunately for us - the page was small and easy enough to just recreate.

If it were a bigger, uglier page - it would have been a lot more problematic....so I want to stack the deck in my favor by implementing Source Safe or something like that.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: stur0063,

We use projects, but more to differentiate between report roles than to keep reports separate (we have hundreds of reports). I'm not sure how projects would relate to source control though?

I realise there is some build-in support for source control from within Dev Studio, but it only supports some source control systems that we don't use - and badly at that I've been told.

As a result, we use source control on our ibi/apps directory directly on the WF server.
Source control has saved our behinds a couple of times already and we're now pondering using separate branches for development, acceptation and production deployment (thereby entirely discarding Dev Studio's deploy mechanism - which is rather underwhelming).

For source control, we started out with Subversion, which works just great but doesn't have a stable OpenVMS client. Some of our staff develop on that OS and we want to use the same source control software across the company, so SVN was discarded (as was Source Safe, but we never even considered that an option).

Eventually we went with Mercurial (aka Hg). It has been working great so far.

In webFOCUS 8 - the "code" is stored in the database.

Source Control, per the Developer Studio Application Development Getting Started : "applicable for local or remote Project development"

So - in WF8 - it sounds like if I want to use versioning software - I have no choice but to use projects...as projects are files.

I have heard from a few different WF people that they are not fond of projects - so I didn't want to go down this path if, in general, projects are not used.
Ultimately I was just hoping to get a feel from people if they use projects…and if they are – then I know I just need to dig into them and grind through some of the issues I was seeing.

If people are not using projects – I’ll look at using a export/import and database backup solution for versioning.

I haven't used projects since v4.3.6!

I don't think they're of any use if you work in a Managed Reporting Environment.
I don't know why this aspect of Dev Studio was carried over to v8.

Perhaps someone can enlighten us.

Hi Francis,

I recently spent time with a customer that has migrated to WF 8 that explained to me why Projects are still used by them.

Basically - the customers that still use Projects are those that don't have Portal/Managed Reporting i.e. the components are still on disk, and not in the repository.

Source Control is in the process of being implemented on the web tier so that BIP and the Desktop products can use it. That is targeted for 81m1 release in June/July.

Thanks for the feedback. We will continue to go with our database backups for now. We will look at Source Control in 81m1.

Please don't make source control tied to projects.

But please also have it as an option for projects. We currently use projects and source control with PushOk software in WF 7703. Doesn't work great, but would still like to use projects and a better version control in WF8. Glad to hear IBI is going to implement something soon. Thanks