Chapter 9 Managing Document Versions in the Repository

Managing Repository Versions

A document version is a picture of the document at a given moment that is saved in the PowerDesigner repository.

When you are working on documents, you need to store them in a secure place accessible by other team members, and you also need to keep records of the evolution of the documents. Document versions are created to keep track of document changes along the design project. Document versions appear as a tree in the Versions tab of a document property sheet.

PowerDesigner objects versions

PowerDesigner objects also support versions. When an object is modified, a version is automatically created to reduce the volume of data in the database and let the user follow up changes on this object. The management of object versions is an automatic process that cannot be controlled by repository users, whatever their rights.

The current version of a document is updatable by default. This means that when you consolidate a document, the current version in the repository is modified in order to reflect changes performed on your local machine.

However, a user with the Freeze Versions right can decide to freeze a version in the repository. In this case, all the items existing in the document are also frozen in order to create an archived version of the document. When a user tries to consolidate a document with a frozen version in the repository, he automatically creates a new version in the document version tree.

Which objects can be versioned?

All repository documents can be versioned.

Other repository objects like folder, user, and group are not versioned.

Database size

Model versions are usually stored as a set of differences from the previous version. They share the unmodified object versions with the previous version. This does not apply to the first versions (v1 or v1.1), or the baselined versions, that are both stored as a set of fully independent objects. As a rule of thumb, such an independent version takes in the database twice the size of the corresponding model stored in an XML file.