11. Version Control: What's New

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Version Control for Designer

Designer 3.0 M2 for Identity Manager contains a first-look release of version control. This is an experimental release of the version control feature and should not be used in a production environment. There are no guarantees about forward compatibility of objects or information checked into version control with this milestone.

Version control enables you to:

• Track revisions of your project, along with all the objects and files in that project
• Share those revisions with other members of your team
• Manage the history of your objects
• Make sure that every member of your team is using the same version of your project

Designer 3.0 M2 supports the Subversion version control system. See http://subversion.tigris.org/.

You can use version control to track changes to objects within your projects and share those changes with other team members. Working on Designer projects as a group is therefore much easier. When you collaborate on a project the version control framework helps you manage that collaboration.

Version control works by leveraging the services of the version control server. The server is the place where different revisions of your projects are stored. These revisions can then be accessed by you or anyone else with permission to access them. Designer uses the Subversion server. Also, Designer includes a pure Java version of the Subversion client. This client program manages all the interaction with the version control server for you.

Version control functionality is available for all Identity Manager objects as well as for the contents of the documents and toolbox folders. Designer 3.0 M2 does not support version control for provisioning objects, but that functionality is planned for release in the next milestone.

You access version control functionality by using the new Version Control view. The version control view will be shown automatically when you import an existing project from a version control server or add a new project to a version control server.

1. Select File > .Import > Designer for Identity Manager > Project (From Version Control)
2. Select Import from version control in the project view with no projects loaded
3. Press the snapshot button in the main tool bar
4. Select Check in on the context menu for a project object in the project view

The Version Control view gives you a dashboard status of your interaction with version control. This view lists the files that you are working on. It also updates to display the changes that your teammates have made in real time.

Version control also enables you to view the history of an object and all the changes that have been made to that object. You can use this history view to see who made a change, when the change was made, and the comment provided for the change.