RE: Selective propagation of changes

   From: Kirmse, Daniel [mailto:daniel.kirmse@sap.com]

   suppose in workspace WS1 there is a collection C containing two
   Files F1, F2. F1 was created with activity A1 and F2 was created
   with activity A2.  Subsequent changes to F1 were made with activity
   A3 and for F2 activity A4 was used for this purpose.

   further suppose in WS2 there allready is a collection C w/o any
   members (created with earlier MERGES).

   For some reasons I only want to propagate F2 (cause F1 is not ready
   yet or secret or ...). The MERGE of A4 into WS2 would fail cause F2
   does not exist.

Actually, it would succeed, but would have no effect on WS2.

   So first I have to MERGE activity A2. Doing this I MERGE a version
   of /WS1/C into WS2 that contains a binding to F1. Due to that a vcr
   for F1 has to be created. Thats definitely not what I want to have.

   So merging the Activity A2 is not an good idea. Only with activity
   A2 there was just the creation of F2. And I just want to propagate
   this creation. But I get other stuff as well. Is this a) right b)
   "sensible"

OK, this is a good news/bad news kind of thing.  The good news (a) you
are right and (b) you are sensible.  In addition, DeltaV provides the
object you need for this (an activity).  The bad news is that there is
no standard method defined by DeltaV for this, so you'll need a custom
method if you want to have your server provide this service.

I would suggest the method name DELTA, and if you want to be fully
general, it would take a list of "add" activities (i.e. those whose
deltas you want to add) and a list of "subtract" activities
(i.e. those deltas you want to remove).

Unlike MERGE (which only performs a checkout if the versions are
on different lines of descent), DELTA will always checkout the
target, and will always have the server compute the results of
adding/deleting the specified deltas (i.e. that's the whole point
of the DELTA request).

Note that a MERGE of an activity (which effectively merges an 
entire line of descent) is very different from a DELTA of an
activity (which only applies the differences captured by an activity).

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2002 09:31:32 UTC