Dimensions CM provides a set of features to enable you to resolve and merge changes at the item revision, project, and project levels.
Typically, when two or more parallel streams of development occur on the same file, it is necessary to merge the separate changes at some later point in time. Dimensions CM provides a comprehensive conflict resolution facility capable of merging any number of input files.
NOTE The following figure illustrates a scenario for version development for file foo.c, where boxes denote branches and circles indicate revisions within branches. There are three significant development branches, MAIN, WINDOWS_XP and MAINTENANCE, and two bug fix sub-branches emanating from the MAINTENANCE branch. The figure also shows that some of the changes were later consolidated back into the MAIN branch and released into Release 2.0.
NOTE This example used named branches within the same project.
Development changes made in parallel may need to be absorbed into mainstream, or files on local machines may need to be consolidated into version control with conflict management. This may be achieved by merging the contents of projects, baselines, and directories.
For example, two projects may be merged into a new project by including all the non-conflicting revisions and then resolving those which contain conflicting changes.
To facilitate this important project management function in an intuitive way, Dimensions provides the interactive Project Merge Tool for merging projects, baselines and file areas on disk.
The graphical Project Merge Tool clearly highlights differences between files on disk or in a project or baseline using color and icons. Based on the differences displayed you can select which changes to include and can invoke the Serena Merge Tool to resolve any conflicts in a graphically intuitive way.
There is also a Merge function and a Resolve Conflicts function for use in merging the contents of projects.
Synchronizing Your Work Area
You can use the Synchronize Wizard to update your work area and the items in a project folder and keep them in step with one-another. You can also use the features of the Windows Explorer Plug-in to work with item files outside the web client or desktop client.
Related topics:
About Parallel Development Tasks
About Comparing and Merging Item Files