Resolve Conflicts screen

Hazzie

Does anyone actualy find the resolve conflicts screen usefull or just lead to more confusion about what has gone wrong.

Take to following screen shot for example.
The error message is
"One or more of the files you are trying to submit is locked by someone else. You cannot submit these files until they have been unlocked."
Yet
1) The file in the section marked Files in Conflict is owned by the user who created the workflow and is NOT locked.
2) The rest fo the files (and there are quite a few more on the page than shows on the screen shot) is in a section called Modified files not in conflict.
Well if there not in conflict what are they doing on the conflicts screen?
3) There is no section called files locked by someone else.
4) There is no mention of the files that are conflict although the system must have detected them to produce that horrible list.

I find this screen so dam gawd awful to use I wonder if anyone else does...


Hazzie
TS 5.5.2 on NT.

Migrateduser

I find that it is unacceptable, especially for non-technical users (for whom even merge - especially of XML files - is really a problem - not just this cryptic UI). Also it does not pop up until you are ready to submit and go to production (which is probably not the right time to find out you have a conflict, especially as it could be scheduled for a weekend/early morning, etc.). And then with no email notification. Plus I think it is always owned by a single user (the SubmitTask owner?), rather than a group.

Better is to find ways to avoid the conflict in the first place. Some things that may help with this:

Use a stricter locking model or teach users to respect locks and get latest before edit.
Before the job starts, ensure that the file(s) are not associated with any other jobs.
Every ExternalTask checks that the files associated with the job are not attached to any other tasks and throws an error if they are.
After submit, update all other workareas on the branch with the updated content.

Sure would be nice if this was default functionality, or at least a configurable option.

Note that iwgetfilejobs is the only way to tell what tasks/jobs are associated with a file - and you have to run it once for each workarea on the branch to get all the results.

Personally I always use an ExternalTask and overwrite with iwsubmit instead of SubmitTask anyway - I have a long list of reasons.