QVCS Product Family Newsletter - November 2005

Publication date: November 8, 2005

Blog highlights - Hurricane Wilma
QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.9.21 Build coming soon...
QVCS-Enterprise: In the pipeline
QVCS/QVCS-Pro: Report the changes between product releases

Blog highlights - Hurricane Wilma

Quma's web site was affected by Hurricane Wilma. You can find out some of the details here.

Happily, everything is now back to normal. I've decided to stick with Verio as a hosting service. They've been fairly pro-active in communicating the problems they ran into, and I figure that this event will make their processes better than before, so an outage will be less likely. Of course, this remains to be seen, but they have to know that if something like this happens again, they'll be out of business. That's a pretty strong motivator to get things right, and to make sure that they stay that way.

QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.9.21 Build coming soon...

I'm putting the finishing touches on the 3.9.21 build. It should be available sometime before the end of the week. It is mostly a bug fix release, but has a few minor enhancements. Some of these appeared in earlier (3.9.19 and 3.9.20 unannounced builds). Here's the list of changes (since the 3.9.18 build):

Fix a bug so that reference copies will get created as they should, irrespective of whether the 'delete workfile' QVCS attribute is enabled. In earlier 3.9 builds, if you had the 'delete workfile' attribute enabled, QVCS would not create a reference copy at check in time.
Fix a bug so that performing a drag-and-drop action to add a file to version control will work even if the associated workfile directory does not yet exist. In earlier releases, you had to manually create the workfile directory in order for the drag-and-drop operation to work.
Fix a bug in the 'get' and 'checkout' dialogs so that a 'get by date' or 'checkout by date' will work. This was broken in earlier 3.8 and 3.9 builds.
Change 'get' and 'checkout' dialogs so that a 'by date' operation will pay attention to the time string that you enter. In earlier releases, the date string was used, but the time string was ignored. Now that the 'by date' operations actually work (see above), they will now also pay attention to the time that you enter. (If you leave the time blank, the time will be equal to midnight for the date that you enter).
Fix a bug in the 'get' and 'checkout' operations so that project level operations can 'get' or 'checkout' to non-default locations.
Fix a bug in the 'checkout' operation so that the 'workfile in' value will be correct in those cases where the checkout is to a non-default location.
Change the way the 'Merged Required' status is computed so it is more accurate.
Fix a bug in qdiff so that command line revision compares will work correctly. This was broken in earlier 3.8 and 3.9 builds.
Fix a checkin problem that happens if the workfile is opened by another application and keyword expansion is enabled for the file.
Fix the 'Login As...' feature. In earlier 3.8 and 3.9 releases, the workfile status was not getting updated correctly among other issues.
QWin now allows you choose whether to ignore case when sorting the file list. This is set on the 'General' tab of the Admin/Preferences... dialog.
Fix a bug in qget that occurs when fetching files that have no file extension.
Fix a bug in the IDE integration. In earlier 3.9 releases, the IDE integration would not automatically rebuild the cache file if it was missing. This is now fixed.
QWin now allows you choose whether to use colored icons (like QVCS 3.7) in the file list. This is set on the 'General' tab of the Admin/Preferences... dialog.

QVCS-Enterprise: In the pipeline

I'm also putting the finishing touches on the 1.1.12 build of the Enterprise product. As noted last month, the changes for this build are focused on improving the usability of the product so that most common actions can be performed without having to use the mouse. I still have a bit more work to go, but much of the functionality is there and works as expected.

QVCS/QVCS-Pro: Report the changes between product releases

In the August 2005 newsletter there was an article on how to create a report that shows the set of files/revisions that changed in going from one product release to the next release. The article applied to QVCS-Enterprise only. So how do you create a similar report using QVCS/QVCS-Pro?

The first thing you need to do is apply a floating label to every file that composes the release that you want to report on. The purpose of the floating label is to make it easy to work with just those files that are part of the release.

The next thing you need to make sure to do: apply a label at the time that you create the release. What I do here is use the 'duplicate label' feature -- I just duplicate the floating label with the new (non-floating) label that will be associated with the new release. For purposes of this article, lets assume that the non-floating label for this release is "3.8.23" (to make it concrete for the QVCS world).

After the "3.8.23" label has been applied, and you have created the 3.8.23 release, you can continue to checkin new changes and add new files (making sure that if you add a new file to your project, you also apply the floating label to that file so that it will become a member of the set of files that compose the product).

When you're ready to create the next release -- say the "3.9.18" release, you apply the "3.9.18" label by duplicating the floating label that you are using to identify the files that compose product.

You're now set to create a report that will show the set of revision changes that you made between the 3.8.23 release and the 3.9.18 release.

You'd do something like the following:

Go to the 'Reports and Filters' menu, and select the 'Maintain Named File Filters...' menu.
On the resulting dialog, click the 'New Collection' button.
On the resulting 'Define Filter Collection Name' dialog, enter some useful name for this new named file filter. For example: "Btwn 3.8.23 and 3.9.18"
On that same dialog, select the name of the project that you want the filter associated with, and click OK.
Click the 'Add...' button on the 'Maintain File Filter Collections' dialog.
On the 'Define File Filter' dialog, select a Filter Type of: 'With Label', and in the Filter Data edit box, enter the string that you are using for the floating label. Make sure that the 'AND Filter' radio button is enabled and click OK. The purpose of this filter is to limit the set of files to only those that are part of the release.
Click the 'Add...' button again.
On the 'Define File Filter' dialog, select a Filter Type of: 'After Label or Missing Label', and in the Filter Data edit box, enter the string you associated with the first release. In our case this is "3.8.23". Make sure the 'AND Filter' radio button is enabled, and click OK.
Click Ok on the 'Maintain File Filter Collections' dialog.
Select the named file filter that you just created from the toolbar combo box.
Next, click the 'Filter Revisions' toolbar button.
On the resulting 'Define Revision Filter' dialog, enable the 'After Label' checkbox, and enter the label string for the first release (in our case "3.8.23").
On the same dialog, enable the 'Up to Label' checkbox, and enter the label string for the newest release (in our case "3.9.18"). Click OK.
Select the project node on the left side tree control, and then click the 'Recurse' toolbar button to enable directory recursion.

The 'Revision Information' pane (lower right) will now contain a list of those revisions that changed between the two releases.

You can print a report by selecting the appropriate menu item from the 'Reports and Filters' menu.