Revision control

Revision control provides developers and administrators with a means of reverting to a previous version of a file or form. If during the process of creating or modifying forms you find an error, revision control returns a working version of your file or form.

Revision control allows a developer to:

  • Create a snapshot of a record
  • Add SCR information and comments to the snapshot
  • Replace the current version of the record with a working version of the record at any time.

Note: Every revision takes up as much disk space as the original record plus a few bytes for comments.

Use revision control in conjunction with the development auditing to track, record, and save changes to your system. The development auditing utility provides a record of the changes to ensure that you load the correct version when you move to production, whereas revision control documents these changes and enables you to create working snapshots.

Service Manager handles revisions as part of the Document Engine. Revisions are available in all utilities that use the Document Engine as base code, including Database Manager, Format Control, Link Editor, Forms Designer, the RAD Editor, and others.

The system stores revisions in a separate file whose name is specified in either the object record for the file or in the datadict record. The system creates this revision file via an option on the Data Policy or the object screen. Administrators specify the maximum number of revisions to store for each record in a file. If you do not specify a number, an unlimited number is stored.

Administrators need to determine in advance in which files to track revisions and then do a minor setup to establish them. Administrators also need to purge revisions prior to migrating to a production system.

Related topics

Environment configuration
Applying customizations to the production environment
Development auditing
Creating revisions
Data Policy and encryption

Related topics

Create a baseline revision
Create a single revision
Revert to a previous revision
Search for revisions
Purge revisions