Question on get latest version

[creeve]

I'm in the process of evaluating Vault, and plan on purchasing it for my small development team (assuming I can get things working!). By the way, seems like a great product so far! I'm looking for some advice on how I can do something in my environment. First of all, we're just going to be using Vault stand-alone (not through visual studio), for a classic asp application, and source for the supporting database objects. Our application is a corporate financial application, and we have different releases that have been customized for different clients of ours (using the same base, but with different customizations depending on their requirements). In addition, we're moving forward with the development of our next release.

What I'm trying to figure out is how best to tag source objects in vault so I can selectively get the latest versions to send to a customer. For example, I have a large enhancement I'm working on for Customer A. This involves changes to maybe 50 out of 200 programs. Once the change is ready to deploy on their server, I want to be able to grab all the affected programs and extract them to a folder, where they can then be zipped up and sent to the customer (or placed on our ftp site for them to download, or whatever). The problem I seem to be running into is how to be able to only get the files that have been changed?? I've tried to comment and/or label the files in question. I can filter by comment to see the ones I want using 'show History', but then can't get them all in one operation. It looks to me that the get option is available on the menu, but is grayed out if I have multiple files selected. Whats the best way to handle this requirement? Should I be identifying the files I want in some way other than a comment or label, to allow me to extract everything matching all at once (rather than one file at a time)?? Or, is there a way I can do this using a command line option?

Any advice greatly appreciated - I really want to get Vault working in our enviroment!

[Beth]

I need to understand a little better so that I can visualize how you wish to work.

Are you using any branching or sharing at all? If not, how will you keep the customer's custom changes from going forward in the process and ending up in other customer's coding?

[creeve]

Yes, I'm planning on branching for each customer specific version. Custom development will then take place on the branch folder.

[Beth]

One option would be to create a label that only has the necessary files in it. You could create it at the common parent folder and remove all the items from the label that don't need to go.

Another option would be to perform a history query and filter by date. then you will have a list of only the files that have been changed.

In the web client, you can select the project and get the recent check-ins which covers the last 7 days.

[Beth]

For getting those files that were changed, you might be able to save the history query as text, then parse out the file info and do a get with the CLC.

[creeve]

I have no problem doing a history query to filter the stuff I'm looking for. My issue is that I can't select multiple items in the query results, and do a get on them. So, you're suggesting the only way to work around this is to save history as text, manipulate it so that it becomes multiple command line get commands, and do the get from the command prompt??

If that's the case, I guess I can try to do this as a workaround, or do something with date filtering, but I have to say, it seems kind of awkward. Don't you have other clients that need to get only stuff meeting certain filter criteria?? (for patch sets or whatever?). It seems like it would be pretty easy to accomodate - just enable 'Get' on the history actions menu for multi-select.

[Beth]

If you know which items were modified, you could place a label on each item and then perform a Get by label.

I do have a feature request for getting all changes since a label. If that would work for you I can add your vote to it.

F: 11310

[creeve]

Get by label sounds like exactly what I want to do! How do I get to that, since I don't see any option anywhere that gives me that capability?

[Beth]

You could perform a Show Label in the Vault GUI client and select one of the labels to get, or you could use the Command-Lind Client to perform the Get. If you make the same label on individual files, I think the CLC works better for performing the Get. For labels on folders, then either way will work fine.