Best practices question on user workspaces

rgrimard · Post by **rgrimard** » Tue Sep 04, 2007 1:53 pm

I'm looking for suggestions on how to best accomodate user private checkins. Let's say Bob is working on a new feature and wants to check in his code to save his work. However, Bob doesn't want to check the changes into an official branch. Bob may have 3 of these side-projects he is working on. Many other users may also have this need. Is branching the right strategy or does Vault offer some other mechanism for these temporary checkins? For example: Perforce offers workspaces. Team System offers "Shelving".

Thanks
Ryan

Beth · Post by **Beth** » Tue Sep 04, 2007 4:01 pm

We don't have shelving, but we do have a feature request open for that. If you would like, I can add your "vote" to that feature.

In the meantime, for some users, branching as a way of checking in changes before they are ready for the main project can work. If you have 100 developers, then that might be problematic depending on what your work flow is like. Your users can check their changes into their branch and then when it's ready to be part of the trunk, they could just merge in their changes.

rgrimard · Post by **rgrimard** » Tue Sep 04, 2007 8:11 pm

Beth wrote:We don't have shelving, but we do have a feature request open for that. If you would like, I can add your "vote" to that feature.

In the meantime, for some users, branching as a way of checking in changes before they are ready for the main project can work. If you have 100 developers, then that might be problematic depending on what your work flow is like. Your users can check their changes into their branch and then when it's ready to be part of the trunk, they could just merge in their changes.

Definitely add my vote!

Question about the user workspaces via branches. I see two possibilities:

1. Share an entire solution and branch particular projects/files and then GET to a new location on my local disk. This seems like a LOT of overhead, but seems to be the safest route to alleviate confusion.
2. Branch particular projects/files. I'm assuming I would have to GET from the main tree and then GET my branch ontop of that to work on my side-project. Would Vault know that the files I got from the branch are actually from the branch? In other words, when I modify files in the branched project, does it know to commit changes to the branch and not the main tree?

Ryan

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Sat Sep 08, 2007 10:12 am

If you use VS 2005 integration (Enhanced Client) with Vault 4.x, then VS knows that the modifications are to the branch, not the item branched from.

If you are using VS 2003-style integration (Classic Client), you may need to unbind and rebind the branch to the proper location, or open the branch from source control to get the proper bindings.