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by John Munro >> Tue, 6 Feb 2007 22:01:57 GMT

I've been reading up on Jade Patch Control (Jade Administration Guide Ch. 4) and Patch Control Hooks (Jade Object Manager Guide Ch. 2).

I would like to add the following features to our development environment:

1) any entity (method/class/form etc.) that is modified and is not in a patch gets added to the developer's current patch
2) no entity that is in a patch can be modified by a developer whose current patch is different
3) when a patch is closed it is automatically extracted
4) when a patch is closed it can be committed or rolled back, undoing all changes recorded in the patch

My questions are:

a) is what I want possible using a patch control hook?
b) has anyone done anything similar?

Thanks,

John Munro

by Brendan >> Wed, 7 Feb 2007 0:01:59 GMT

Hi John,
You probably want to alter 1 and 2 slightly to

1) any entity (method/class/form etc.) that is modified and is not in a *currently open* patch gets added to the developer's current patch. Otherwise you're in for a one time change for each entity.

2) no entity that is in a *currently open* patch can be modified by a developer whose current patch is different

1 and 2 can and have been done using patch control and patch control hooks. 3 could be done (though I haven't done it - the extract was always explicitly requested and done in batch mode). 4 can't be done. Entity changes are committed as each entity is changed so the patch doesn't define any kind of transaction. The only way to undo the effects of a change under a patch (assuming rolling back the database is not an option and it hardly ever will be) is to change the entities back to the way they were.

If your C++ isn't up to it (and mine certainly isn't) a workable approach which I have used successfully is to write a small amount of C++ code which converts the hook parameters to a string and sends it as a TCP/IP message to a Jade process in a different environment (maybe even the same environment? - not sure, haven't tried it). It then waits on a TCP/IP response to exit the hook call with a zero or non-zero return code. That way you can write most of the code in Jade.

With a small number of developers, 2) above is the simplest approach to controlling collisions in the dev environment though it will create some management issues from time to time. Since I did the implementation for a large number of concurrent developers (over 25), I actually allow collisions under certain circumstances but it can be tricky and you would need to think through the ramifications. I would recommend keeping it simple with just a small team of developers.

Cheers, Brendan