Update: The information shown here is outdated.  The current state of team support is described in the fmStudio Handbook.  We are working on commercial team support. If this is of interest to you, then please let us know, so that we can inform you when it is available.

Recently we published ReqIF-comparing as the first step of team support for ProR.  We released that plug-in as part of the ProR Essentials.  We are  proud to now announce the release of the team plug-in, which provides workflow support.  Read on to learn now to install and to use it.  The team plug-in requires a subversion server to operate.

Installation

The plug-in is available as part of the ProR Essentials.  In any ProR Installation, select Help | Install new Software… and pick the “Essentials” repository.  You’ll find the feature in the “ProR Essentials” category:

Just follow the wizard, as you would normally do during an installation.  You’ll have to accept the license and restart Eclipse.  Upon starting, you’ll be asked to select a Subversion connector.  If you are unsure which one to pick, select the latest SVN Kit Connector, as shown below:

Upon clicking finish, Eclipse will guide you through the installation process of the chosen connector, which concludes with another restart.  The installation is now complete.

Configuring team support

To use the feature, Team support must be enabled on a per-project-basis.  To do so, right-click on the chose project and select “Enable ProR Versioning” from the “ProR” context menu, as shown below:

Doing so will launch the configuration wizard.  It consists of two parts.  First you have to decide whether updating and committing should happen automatically:

If “update automatically” is selected, then the project is updated upon opening.  Selecting this option ensures that the latest modifications on the Subversion server are retrieved, before starting to edit.

If “commit automatically” is selected, then local changes are pushed into the repository upon closing the file.  This is useful to make sure that the Subversion server is up to date upon finishing a work session.  Before the commit, an update is always performed.

Of course, update and commit can be performed manually as well, at any time.  The project’s “ProR” context menu has entries for these actions.  The regular team context menu also exists and works normally.

Further, both a commit and update can lead to a merge conflict. Later we describe how conflicts are handled.

And last, these settings can be changed again any time by selecting “Properties” from the Project’s context menu.

After this has been configured, the subversion server to be used has to be configured as well.  To access it, you typically need a URL, a username and a password.  This is the standard svn-Dialog:

Once everything is configured, the Team plug-in will add the project’s content to subversion and commit it.  You may modify the generated commit message.  And this concludes the project configuration.  Now it is time to start the team work.

Working with Team support

The team plug-in activates on opening and closing of .reqif files (if enabled), by updating and committing the file, respectively.  The user will notice the additional subversion activities during these tasks.  In addition, upon a commit, you must provide a commit message.

If a file is added to a project that is managed by the Team plug-in, the file is automatically added to subversion.

And this is essentially all there is.  Except for the need to provide commit messages, the team plug-in stays out of the way of the user.  You can focus on your work and be sure that the subversion server always has the latest data.  The following screenshot shows how the commit dialog pops up after closing a ReqIF file:

Of course, a manual update or commit can be triggered any time through the ProR or the Team context menu of the project.

We hope that this work is useful to you and look forward to feedback from the community.

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