QVCS Product Family Newsletter - November 2006

Publication date: November 17, 2006

QVCS-Enterprise: 2.0.12 Release Available
Blog highlights - ~sak temp files and vacations...
QVCS-Enterprise Tip: Using Regular Expressions
QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.10.15 out soon

QVCS-Enterprise: 2.0.12 Release Available

The 2.0.12 release is available for download from the usual location:

http://www.qumasoft.com/qvcse.zip

This is a 'free' update to users who have purchased their license within the past year.

This release is a minor release that cleans up several problems with earlier 2.0.x builds. This release is supported for Windows XP, W2K, Windows 2003 server, various flavors of Linux, and (new to this release), Solaris 10. This release will probably also work on the MacIntosh, though we have not tested on Macs here.

You can see some of the details here:

http://www.qumasoft.com/qvcseHistory.html

Blog highlights - ~sak temp files and vacations...

If you want to be able to use a different visual compare tool for Word documents than for regular text files, there's a good summary of how to do that here.

A support request about pesky ~sak... temp files that get created by Visual Studio (VS 2003 and VS 2005) led to a blog entry on how to make them go away.

The QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.12 installer will fix these registry entries 'automatically'. For QVCS-Pro, you still have to do it 'by hand'. This will be fixed in the 3.10.15 release (see below).

Fall is a nice time for vacations -- except when you have kids at home, they have to go to school. Our youngest child is now a sophomore at college, so the Fall vacation is turning into an annual diversion.

Last year, we traveled back to Hawaii. This year, we went to California. Some more details and pictures are posted on the blog here and here.

The lasting memory is the cool weather of San Francisco, and the unbelievable size of the giant sequoias.

QVCS-Enterprise Tip: Using Regular Expressions

QVCS-Enterprise includes support for using regular expressions in defining a filename type filter, and in defining a revision search filter. The code behind these filters is pretty simple because the Java platform includes support for regular expressions. Getting the filters to work in a useful way is less trivial for those of us who are not experts in defining regular expressions.

In this tip, I'll provide some simple example regular expressions that you can use as a starting point for defining your own.

Let's start with a simple regular expression that you can use in an 'Include Regular Expression Filename' type of filter. Suppose you want to show only those files that have a .java file extension. We could use the 'Include Extension' filter instead, but the point here is to define a regular expression that will accomplish the same result.

A regular expression that accomplishes this is:

.*.java

So... If you launch the QVCS-Enterprise client (gui.bat or gui.sh), and go to the Filters/Maintain Filters... menu, and on the Maintain Filter Collections dialog, define a new file filter, you can add a filter type of 'Include Regular Expression Filename', use a Filter Data value of ".*.java", and you'll have a filter that uses a regular expression to filter the filename.

(Note that if you enter an invalid regular expression in the filter data, the filter data will be reported as 'Bad Expression').

An advantage of using a regular expression to filter filenames instead of the 'Include Extension' type of filter is that you can filter on portions of the filename besides the file extension.

Suppose you want to show only those .java files that begin with a certain string. For example, in the QVCS-Enterprise source code, all the file filter class names begin with "FileFilter". So, to display just those files, I can use a regular expression value of:

FileFilter.*.java

Suppose I want to display any file that has the string 'Filter' as part of its name? I would use a regular expression value of:

.*Filter.*

These same kind of regular expressions can be used with the 'Revision description regular expression' filter to limit the revisions included in a report to those that match the given regular expression. This can be a useful way to report on those revisions associated with a specific issue. For example, if you include an issue tracking number in the revision description when you check in a file, you can use the 'Revision description regular expression' filter to create a report that includes only the revisions associated with the issue number you define in the regular expression.

(Note that the 'Revision description regular expression' filter will allow only those files that have any revision that matches the regular expression. To see a report that contains only the filtered revisions, you need to select the Reports/Generate Report menu).

This article has barely scratched the surface of regular expressions -- indeed, there are entire books on the subject. If you want to dive deeper into the subject, a good place to start is this web site,

or take a look at this book on the subject.

QVCS/QVCS-Pro: 3.10.15 out soon

I plan on publishing a 3.10.15 build of QVCS/QVCS-Pro before the end of November. This will be a bug fix release to fix the ~sak temporary files issue noted above. It will have a few other other minor changes as well.