Using BIRT in a Team Environment

tudor

Hi guys,

I read "building a shared development framework" chapter from "BIRT: A field guide to reporting" book but still have a few questions about developing a project in a team environment. I am wondering how to manage your library structure when you have more than 2 developers on a project.

Let's say that 2 devs have the same project version (the latest from repository). And they want to modify a library in the same time. Dev1 creates a new report item A in library lib and Dev2 creates a new report item B in the same library lib. Even though report item A has nothing in common with B they will have the same ids as I observed that BIRT does not assign random ids. If dev1 commits modifications(the newly created report item A), and if dev2 updates his project, he will get conflicts because the new updated report item A has the same id as the report item created by himself, B.

In a java class, for example, if two developers modify different parts of the class and commit/update as in the described situation the code will automatically merge and they will have no conflicts.

My question is:
Can 2 developers modify a library in the same time? If yes, please tell me how to achieve that.

Thank you

CBR

Hi,

that's a good point. As you already mentioned you are unlucky if you want to merge changes. Like a lot of other XML structured files rptdesign and rptlibrary files are non mergeable.

I solve this problem by splitting elements to multiple report libraries. Libraries should only contain elements that occur multiple times in your project so it's always best to identify a single person to be maintainer of a single rptlibrary file (e.g. one person for datasets of a certain topic), some other person for masterpages and so on. This approach works best from all i ve seen in the past.