Serena Dimensions CM 14.1 - Important Information About this Release

This document contains important information about the 14.1 release of Serena Dimensions CM. Last updated 18th June 2014.

New Features in Serena Dimensions CM 14.1Fixed IssuesSoftware Compatibility RequirementsInstallation and Upgrade Notes and IssuesKnown IssuesUnsupported Functionality

Contents

New Features in Serena Dimensions CM 14.1

You can watch videos of Dimensions CM features in the Serena Documentation Center: http://help.serena.com/doc_center/doc_center.html#dcmVid

All the new features described below are detailed in the Dimensions CM 14.1 documentation. A searchable PDF portfolio of all the documents can be downloaded from the Serena support web site http://support.serena.com and the Serena Documentation Center http://help.serena.com/doc_center/doc_center.html#dcmDoc

What's New in 14.1?

Serena Pulse

Changesets

Versioned Repository Schema

Creating a New Stream or Project Based on a Previous Version

Lock-Free Delivery

Enhanced Merging across Streams

Annotations View

Personal Library Cache and Delta Transfers

Auto Update

New File Merge Tool

Enhanced Upload Rules

Tomcat and Java Runtime Environment

New dmcli Commands

Changes to dmcli Commands

Installing the Eclipse Integration from a Server

Dimensions CM Java API

Serena Pulse

Serena Pulse is a new tool for developers that provides you with an intuitive visualization of changes in your streams and projects.

Reviews

Reviews enables your development team to collaborate using a configurable workflow. Delivery filters control which changesets automatically create reviews. You can use reviews to:

The review list displays all the reviews that match the selected filter.

Review Page

A review page displays information about a specific change, including:

You can also:

Viewing Changesets

There are multiple ways that you can view the information in changesets:

The Changeset Graph

The changeset graph visualizes streams and their change history across multiple releases. This provides development teams and release managers with a visual understanding of what changes are being worked on, where, and why. Tight coupling between changesets and continuous integration tools, such as Jenkins, provides feedback on the health of changes and real time indication of release readiness based on build and test status.

You can use a changeset graph to:

Changesets

A changeset is a logical grouping of changes that is created automatically every time that you deliver changes to a stream or project in a repository. Each changeset creates a new version of a stream or project. Changesets give insight into the development activity in your streams and enable you to easily identify changes. They also reduce the complexity of parallel development by making it easier to manage sets of changes. Changesets enables you to view all of the changes that have been made to a stream or project since it was created.

The Changesets dialog box (or view) is available in all clients and integrations. Depending on the client or integration you can:

Versioned Repository Schema

To enables new features, such as changesets and enhanced merging, Dimensions CM 14.1 uses a Versioned Repository Schema (VRS). After upgrading to Dimensions CM 14.1 from an earlier version you must upgrade the data in your RDBMS to use VRS. The upgrade is required to populate the VRS for the existing streams, projects, and baselines.

To populate the VRS for a stream or project the upgrade replays the history of changes to that stream starting from its creation, against the VRS, one changeset at a time. This re-creates the version history of a stream in the new schema.

For details about upgrading your data see the installation guide for your platform.

Creating a New Stream or Project Based on a Previous Version

When creating a new stream or project you can base it on a previous version of an existing stream (or project). The new stream inherits all the item revisions from the parent stream (or project), not just the tip revisions. This new functionality is available in the desktop client, the Windows and Visual Studio integrations, and the command-line client (dmcli).

Lock-Free Delivery

Lock-free delivery enables multiple developers to deliver different changes to the same folder concurrently.

Enhanced Merging across Streams

Prior to Dimensions CM 14.1 you could only merge streams when performing an update operation. In 14.1 the update and merge operations have been separated and there is a new Merge wizard in all the clients and integrations, and a new MERGE command. Merging streams and changes is now quicker and it is easier to accurately identify the source of changes, especially when refactoring has occurred. The Update wizard has also been redesigned and is similar to the new Merge wizard.

You can merge:

Merge is similar to Update and uses a work area to apply changes and process conflicts. This enables you to safely merge, build, and test before delivering the merge results to a target stream in a repository. When you merge two objects, for example a stream with another stream, or a stream with a baseline, Dimensions CM looks for a common ancestor. This is a point in time where the streams or work areas diverged. This is typically referred to as a three-way merge. The merging process uses changesets to find the common ancestor.

Annotations View

The Annotations view annotates the lines of code in your source files. Annotations make it easier to find when a change was introduced. You can also see who made a change and why. Each annotation displays the item revision and the name of the user who delivered the change. You can hover over an annotation to view additional information about an item revision such as:

The Annotations view is available in all the clients and integrations. You can also use the ANNOTATE command in the dmcli command-line client to list file annotations.

Personal Library Cache and Delta Transfers

Personal library cache directory (PLCD), and delta compression on file transfers, provide significant performance improvements for geographically distributed development teams. PLCD enables faster access to repository files for distributed teams by removing network transfers when the same revision has been previously fetched to a workstation. PLCD makes a local copy in a cache directory of items downloaded from, and uploaded to, Dimensions CM. This mechanism speeds up transfers when fetching the same revision more than once, for example, fetching a baseline or restoring item revisions.

Delta transfers reduce network traffic by only transferring the sections of files that have been modified between revisions. For this optimization to be applied the original revision of the file must have been fetched to, or saved from, the local workstation. The greatest reduction in transfer times is for files that have modifications in only a few sections and large continuous sections of unchanged content. Files that have widely dispersed multiple changes between revisions have a smaller improvement in transfer times.

Auto Update

Auto update is the process of managing the automatic update of Dimensions CM clients and agents. Auto update has the following benefits for administrators:

During the silent installation of clients and agents you can add values that point to a server hosting installation packages for auto update. For details see Configuring and Using Auto Update in the Dimensions CM System Administration Guide.

New File Merge Tool

The default file merge tool in Dimensions CM on Windows is Araxis Merge, a two and three-way file comparison (diff) and merging tool. You can obtain help in Araxis Merge at any time by using the commands in the Help menu or by pressing the F1 key. Some windows also contain a Help button. You can change the default file merge tool to the Serena Merge Tool or any third party application. For details see Configuring the Default Merge Tools in the Dimensions CM System Administration Guide.

Enhanced Upload Rules

Upload rules now support multiple wildcards and Ant style pattern matches in filenames and paths. Ant patterns help to simplify the organization of separate design part rules. For example, you can define design part rules by a directory pattern match while maintaining the existing item type to file extension mapping. The patterns are similar to those used in DOS and UNIX:

For more details see Upload Rules in the Dimensions CM Process Configuration Guide.

Tomcat and Java Runtime Environment

Dimensions CM 14.1 installs the version 7.0 of Tomcat and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

New dmcli Commands

The following new commands have been added to dmcli, the Dimensions CM command-line client:

For details see the Dimensions CM 14.1 Command-Line Reference.

Changes to dmcli Commands

The following commands have changed:

Installing the Eclipse Integration from a Server

You can install, and upgrade, the Eclipse integration for Dimensions CM from an update site hosted by the Dimensions CM server. This site supports both Tomcat and Websphere. You can use the same method to install Appcelerator Titanium Studio into Eclipse. For details see the installation guide for your platform.

Dimensions CM Java API

The Java API is built with Java 6. Serena recommends that programs using the Dimensions CM Java API are rebuilt using Java 6 or later.

Fixed Issues

Software Compatibility Requirements

Installation and Upgrade Notes and Issues

Known Issues

Unsupported Functionality